Increased pressure to censor will also incentivise other countries to increase mining capacity
Discussion
Sure, but more mining capacity doesn't help if the protocol itself is captured. Or if the majority of miners is forced (and money printer subsidized) to reorg non-compliant blocks.
What do you mean by captured? There is no way to force every node runner to run a specific version. Transaction fees will incentivise miners to operate in other jurisdictions and mine "non-compliant" blocks, no?
That incentive can be compensated with fiat payments. For every "bad" transaction you don't mine, government pays you 3x the fees in fiat. At the current fee levels they could afford doing that for centuries.
You don't need every node operator to cooperate to force a bad change through. But even if you did, you mislead people through propaganda, malicious or coerced developers, etc.
SegWit2x failed at both of these approaches, but they were rather incompetent.
Are you assuming that all global governments will act in unison?
No. Just have the majority of hash power under the control of US corporations and friendly / obedient countries. Force those to reorg others that don't comply. After a few demonstrations of a willingness to do this, most other miners won't take the risk of getting a stale block. All of that for the price of a Tomahawk.
Bribes to foreign miners are even cheaper: show us proof you mined a block that didn't include (top of mempool) sanctioned addresses and we'll compensate you 3x for lost revenue.
(maybe I shouldn't give such detailed instructions to future CIA readers :-)
Proper mining pool decentralization should mitigate this to some extend, so it's important to work on.
I think maintaining the integrity of the social layer is equally important. Especially in states with a lot of hash power. The scenario you are suggesting implies that the people in government is not interested in holding Bitcoin on a personal level. I think ita becoming the opposite in the US?
> maintaining the integrity of the social layer is equally important
I think that's exactly the point nostr:npub1mznweuxrjm423au6gjtlaxmhmjthvv69ru72t335ugyxtygkv3as8q6mak is making. Don't just assume Bitcoin inevitably wins without effort.
Indeed
Ok, so let's brainstorm ways to do this effectively. How to ensure we keep winning.
1. Supporting people like Lola who take action.
2. Talk about Bitcoin to family and friends.
3. Debunk FUD.
4. Elect bitcoiners
...
With 4, it's probably more efficient to orange pill existing politicians than to get bitcoiners elected?
Assuming the US holds a lot of Bitcoin by the time this happens and that ETFs allow people to cash out, what is the incentive for them to harm the network and crash the Bitcoin price?