Anita Posch’s X post warning of the dangers of governments and institutions buying large amounts of bitcoin went viral this week—even if it was because of the trollish community note that appeared underneath it. I think the main concern here is that these large holders can influence Bitcoin’s consensus rules to force censorship.
When it comes to research specifically, mining concentration is actually a direct threat. But if it’s just miner processing, it will only last so long if the majority of miners are willing to continue doing it— at the cost of losing transaction money. If and when the audit stops, the transaction will begin to be verified again as if nothing happened.
If economic nodes were to enforce auditing as new protocol rules, however, it would be considered a soft fork. In this case, miners cannot go back to testing without splitting the blockchain between “improved” (testing) and non-improved nodes; that would be a hard fork. Buyers and sellers of the two versions of bitcoin then decide which blockchain is more valuable; this is why some bitcoiners are concerned about governments and other large institutions collecting a significant portion of the bitcoin supply.
It’s a reasonable concern, and something to be aware of. At the same time (and similar to my argument in this Take), it is not clear to me that governments or large institutions would be willing to risk everything by betting on a Bitcoin research fork. But more importantly, there’s not much we can do to stop governments or other institutions from buying bitcoin anyway—and there shouldn’t be, since that (ironically) itself represents a form of censorship.
The best countermeasure, in this regard, is actually already proposed by Nikolaus: Do not sell your MicroStrategy bitcoin.
This article is a Take it. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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