vnprc on Nostr: TL;DR you are not thinking adversarially. All centralized systems fail over a long ...
TL;DR you are not thinking adversarially.
All centralized systems fail over a long enough time frame. So the question is not "will this arrangement fail?". The questions to be asking are "when will it fail?" and "what form will this failure take?".
Bitcoin is positioned to disrupt the strongest tool of control that national governments have: the money printer. Do you think they will just roll over and let it happen? I'm not naive, when people (or organizations run by people) get backed into a corner they get real nasty. We are still in the nice phase. Nasty is yet to come.
Ponder this: 30-40% of the hashrate is in the US. Another 30% is in China. The last third is somewhat distributed. The US is moving toward a bitcoin standard. No idea what China is doing but it is an autocracy so I expect they are behind the US on this. What happens when the cold war between these superpowers turns hot? Is China just gonna leave the mining pools alone?
If I was Xi I would dump treasury assets and fork the blockchain as soon the shooting starts. Tank the US economy exactly when you can inflict the most damage. They did this with Deepseek just a few months ago. With bitcoin this is even easier because Xi can just send men with guns to Bitmain HQ and do whatever the fuck he wants to do with 30% of block template production and 80% of ASIC production. Xi invokes emergency powers (or maybe it's not even necessary b/c he's already a dictator!) to trap existing ASICs within his sphere of control (which extends far beyond the Chinese borders we draw on maps). He uses his enormous ASIC production advantage to attack the real bitcoin blockchain with constant reorgs.
In this scenario the bitcoin value drops like a rock and stays down. Bitcoin developers' personal savings are wiped out and software development all but halts. The portion of global markets that still operate on the dollar standard go into a tailspin. Drone swarms start tearing up the "untouchable" blue water US Navy because our "elites" have their heads too far up their ass to recognize that we have lost the technological lead that enabled US global hegemony for the past 100 years. How does bitcoin recover from this?
Here's another scenario. Say in 3 years the American voters get tired of losing thanks to Trump's unbelievably stupid tariff strategy and vote in another 4 years of Marxist LARPers. But this time, thanks to the erosion of rule of law and checks and balances their efforts to vilify and dismantle bitcoin mining businesses succeed. They pass a law forcing bitcoin miners to support a hard fork to a proof of stake system. The real bitcoiners need to scramble and get their ASICs out of the country ASAP. Too late! The wannabe Marxists have already put export controls in place. Another chain fork, another unmitigated disaster for the bitcoin movement as a whole. It's not really that far fetched.
Bitcoin cannot be destroyed but it's path to global adoption can be set back by decades, or even centuries. Long enough for the tyrants to seize control of the system.
My point is not that these scenarios are inevitable. My point is that the failure modes are too innumerable to count. There are too many unknown unknowns. My conclusion is that bitcoin is too important to remain centralized. The thing that actually matters most is who is building block templates. Who controls the transactions that go in to the block and who controls the coinbase outputs of each new block.
You are correct that hashrate distribution is also critical but it's downstream of block template production.
A decentralized mining pool stack is well within reach. We can fix this before it spirals out of control. I intend to do exactly that.
All centralized systems fail over a long enough time frame. So the question is not "will this arrangement fail?". The questions to be asking are "when will it fail?" and "what form will this failure take?".
Bitcoin is positioned to disrupt the strongest tool of control that national governments have: the money printer. Do you think they will just roll over and let it happen? I'm not naive, when people (or organizations run by people) get backed into a corner they get real nasty. We are still in the nice phase. Nasty is yet to come.
Ponder this: 30-40% of the hashrate is in the US. Another 30% is in China. The last third is somewhat distributed. The US is moving toward a bitcoin standard. No idea what China is doing but it is an autocracy so I expect they are behind the US on this. What happens when the cold war between these superpowers turns hot? Is China just gonna leave the mining pools alone?
If I was Xi I would dump treasury assets and fork the blockchain as soon the shooting starts. Tank the US economy exactly when you can inflict the most damage. They did this with Deepseek just a few months ago. With bitcoin this is even easier because Xi can just send men with guns to Bitmain HQ and do whatever the fuck he wants to do with 30% of block template production and 80% of ASIC production. Xi invokes emergency powers (or maybe it's not even necessary b/c he's already a dictator!) to trap existing ASICs within his sphere of control (which extends far beyond the Chinese borders we draw on maps). He uses his enormous ASIC production advantage to attack the real bitcoin blockchain with constant reorgs.
In this scenario the bitcoin value drops like a rock and stays down. Bitcoin developers' personal savings are wiped out and software development all but halts. The portion of global markets that still operate on the dollar standard go into a tailspin. Drone swarms start tearing up the "untouchable" blue water US Navy because our "elites" have their heads too far up their ass to recognize that we have lost the technological lead that enabled US global hegemony for the past 100 years. How does bitcoin recover from this?
Here's another scenario. Say in 3 years the American voters get tired of losing thanks to Trump's unbelievably stupid tariff strategy and vote in another 4 years of Marxist LARPers. But this time, thanks to the erosion of rule of law and checks and balances their efforts to vilify and dismantle bitcoin mining businesses succeed. They pass a law forcing bitcoin miners to support a hard fork to a proof of stake system. The real bitcoiners need to scramble and get their ASICs out of the country ASAP. Too late! The wannabe Marxists have already put export controls in place. Another chain fork, another unmitigated disaster for the bitcoin movement as a whole. It's not really that far fetched.
Bitcoin cannot be destroyed but it's path to global adoption can be set back by decades, or even centuries. Long enough for the tyrants to seize control of the system.
My point is not that these scenarios are inevitable. My point is that the failure modes are too innumerable to count. There are too many unknown unknowns. My conclusion is that bitcoin is too important to remain centralized. The thing that actually matters most is who is building block templates. Who controls the transactions that go in to the block and who controls the coinbase outputs of each new block.
You are correct that hashrate distribution is also critical but it's downstream of block template production.
A decentralized mining pool stack is well within reach. We can fix this before it spirals out of control. I intend to do exactly that.