An X submit by Anita Posch warning concerning the dangers of governments and establishments shopping for up massive quantities of bitcoin went viral this week— even when simply due to the trollish neighborhood word that appeared beneath it. I feel the principle concern right here is that these large holders might affect the Bitcoin consensus guidelines to impose censorship.
In relation to censorship particularly, mining centralization is definitely a extra direct risk. But when it’s simply miners censoring, it could solely final for so long as a majority of miners is prepared to maintain doing it— on the expense of forfeiting transaction charges. If and when the censorship stops, transactions would begin confirming once more as if nothing occurred.
If financial nodes had been to implement censorship as new protocol guidelines as nicely, nonetheless, it could actually certainly be thought-about a mushy fork. On this situation, miners can’t revert from the censorship with out splitting the blockchain between “upgraded” (censoring) and non-upgraded nodes; that may represent a tough fork. Consumers and sellers of the 2 variations of bitcoin would then decide which blockchain is extra worthwhile; because of this some bitcoiners are involved about governments and different massive establishments accumulating a major share of the bitcoin provide.
It’s an affordable concern, and one thing to concentrate on. On the similar time (and just like my argument on this Take), it’s not apparent to me that governments or massive establishments could be prepared to threat all of it by betting on a censorship fork of Bitcoin. However much more importantly, there isn’t a lot we are able to do to cease governments or different establishments from shopping for bitcoin in any case— nor ought to there be, as that may (sarcastically) itself symbolize a type of censorship.
The very best countermeasure, on this regard, was really already proposed by Nikolaus: Don’t promote MicroStrategy your bitcoin.
This text is a Take. Opinions expressed are totally the writer’s and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
