An X publish by Anita Posch warning concerning the dangers of governments and establishments shopping for up giant quantities of bitcoin went viral this week— even when simply due to the trollish neighborhood notice that appeared beneath it. I feel the primary concern right here is that these huge holders might affect the Bitcoin consensus guidelines to impose censorship.
In terms of 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 keen 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 effectively, nonetheless, it could actually 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 might represent a tough fork. Consumers and sellers of the 2 variations of bitcoin would then decide which blockchain is extra useful; because of this some bitcoiners are involved about governments and different giant establishments accumulating a major share of the bitcoin provide.
It’s an inexpensive concern, and one thing to pay attention to. On the identical time (and much like my argument on this Take), it’s not apparent to me that governments or giant establishments can be keen to danger 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 anyhow— nor ought to there be, as that might (paradoxically) itself characterize a type of censorship.
The very best countermeasure, on this regard, was truly already proposed by Nikolaus: Don’t promote MicroStrategy your bitcoin.
This text is a Take. Opinions expressed are fully the writer’s and don’t essentially mirror these of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Journal.
