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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Course. In the early days, the answer was clear: Monopoly mining would have destroyed everything, so there is no incentive for a coalition to form.Enter USGIf the USG commits to a plan, over years and decades, to invest in Bitcoin, they will have created something which cannot fail. It simply cannot. Regardless of who mines Bitcoin, who is priced out, what parties use the chain, it cannot fail, and it won’t fail. If there is a constitutional crisis about mining, this crisis will be resolved and resolved in a very clear and definitive way.There are quite a few ways to resolve a constitutional crisis, when you expand your window to include centralized options. In the early days these options would have been discarded as inferior to failure, but if failure is not an option, all options can and will be considered. A simple brute force assertion of 51% power by USG and US controlled miners is one option (this need not require censorial monopoly mining.) Another workable solution is a permissioned soft-fork which only allows new blocks by the publicly traded miners. Obviously, Proof of Stake is on the table. Another option would be to convert the UTXO set of Bitcoin into a CBDC whose transactions are confirmed by the Fed. This would bring Bitcoin to the masses at lightning speed and bring massive value to early holders.The point is that under this regime, monopoly mining is no longer a failure per se. Any coalition of miners could pursue monopoly mining, starting with selfish mining and snowballing their coalition to 51%. As long as they don’t do anything that directly irritates the USG, they can’t break the system. If they achieve monopoly mining, the USG is still there, backstopping Bitcoin.In short, the USG enmeshing itself with Bitcoin’s success decades into the future removes Bitcoin’s ultimate weapon against centralization; its option to fail.It’s hard to imagine that miners who are fighting for tiny profit margins would continue with the decentralization theater, when they ought to find it more profitable to form a coalition and monopoly mine, which strictly speaking, isn’t even against the rules.This is a guest post by Micah Warren. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.Bitcoin MagazineEstablished in 2012, Bitcoin Magazine is the oldest and most established source of trustworthy news, information and thought leadership on Bitcoin.
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