An X publish by Anita Posch warning in regards to 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 observe that appeared beneath it. I feel the principle concern right here is that these large holders may affect the Bitcoin consensus guidelines to impose censorship.
On the subject of censorship particularly, mining centralization is definitely a extra direct menace. But when it’s simply miners censoring, it might 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 certainly be thought of a gentle fork. On this state of affairs, 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. Patrons and sellers of the 2 variations of bitcoin would then decide which blockchain is extra priceless; 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 identical time (and much 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 will 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 perfect countermeasure, on this regard, was truly 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.
