It doesn't right up until the moment that somebody realizes the reward of profit is worth the risk of operating a mining operation capable of pulling off a 51% attack.
I said Bitcoin's survival was not predicated on centralized mining facility. You seem to be agreeing with me, because your scenario is one of a 51% attack predicated on a large centralized mining facility. You are overlooking the number of actors capable of pulling off illegal mining, and the difficulty in coordinating all of them.
You are acknowledging even under clamp downs, mining will continue. If you think about 30 seconds further, you'll realize it will be widespread and it is likely not just one clever 51% attack hopeful will come up with the bright idea of running an underground mining operation. Prisoner's dillema keeps all the decentralized nodes from colluding (risk losing your mining reward against the hope everyone will stick to the deal and hash a dirty chain). Prisoner's dillema acts the same way against more centralized groups so long as no one of them controls a large portion of the available hashrate.
Basically your statement is "people will pull off scaled mining operations even if illegal, and bitcoins demise is predicated on centralized mining operations" and I agree with you 100%.
If your argument is that Bitcoin is susceptible to a 51% attack, the answer is you are correct and you always have been. It is built into the protocol.
Bitcoin's survival is predicated upon the distributed, cooperating members of the network being willing and able to spend more cycles than any one bad actor.
Prohibition of mining centralized mining tautologically reduces the number of cycles the network is able to cooperatively dedicate toward mining. Whatever the hash rate otherwise would be without a prohibition, once you prohibit and drastically reduce the contribution of centralized mining, it would be drastically less.
But the ability for someone to put together a centralized mining facility is still there, it just carries additional risk. If nobody else is performing centralized mining, the incentives for someone to quietly put together an outfit of their own for the sake of attempting a 51% attack grows. This might be outright illegal, it might be done by a government, or a myriad other possibilities. Either way, it's an order of magnitude easier in that future than it is today for someone to gather the necessary hardware to mount such an attack and turn it on all at once.
> Basically your statement is "people will pull off scaled mining operations even if illegal, and bitcoins demise is predicated on centralized mining operations" and I agree with you 100%.
My statement is "people can pull off scaled-down mining operations even if illegal, but this reduces the effective hashrate; further, other people can pull off scaled-up mining operations in the short term".
>Bitcoin's survival is predicated upon the distributed, cooperating members of the network being willing and able to spend more cycles than any one bad actor.
Which is an entirely different statement than saying bitcoin's survival is predicated on centralized mining. It's not.
If centralized mining operations can continue, centralized mining operations could have a 51% attack.
Thank you captain obvious, ultimate king of semantics.
Your entire argument is one of bitcoin's demise via 51% attack being predicated on centralized mining. I don't think you understand that claiming a 51% attack is predicated on scaled-up operations is an entirely different statement than arguing against bitcoin's survival not being predicated on centralized mining.
You imagine a scenario of majority hashrate bad actors, all cooperating, can pull off centralized mining, and that their hashrate exceeds the entire hashrate of the decentralized less upscaled nodes as well as the more centralized good actors. That is a possible, but unlikely scenario that has always existed since the beginning of bitcoin for the reasons I previously stated before. It simply hasn't happened, there is currently a roughly $1T bet that it won't happen in the near term, and there is a valid argument to be made that when centralized mining becomes more restricted that the likelihood of successful 51% attack goes down and not up.
>people can pull off scaled-down mining operations even if illegal, but this reduces the effective hashrate
Probably, but not necessarily so. If I shutdown my up-scaled operation and send my miners to 100 of my friends to use discretely in their homes with similar uptime, tell me what difference does it make to the total hashrate? The only real effect is it makes it even harder to coordinate a 51% attack.
>My statement is "people can pull off scaled-down mining operations even if illegal, but this reduces the effective hashrate; further, other people can pull off scaled-up mining operations in the short term".
It sounds very easy to say "just get 51% of the world hashrate" (you seem unaware of what a feat this is) when in fact worldwide many actors would simply mine to the extent they can get away with it, probably including large centralized operations, and prisoner's dilemma and lack of worldwide coordination of bad actors would quite likely prevent such a 51% attack. I also don't think you can make the presumption the decentralized, down-scaled nodes will be a minority of the total hashrate if up-scaled mining becomes difficult (of course, it is possible, no in is denying that a 51% attack has always been a means of attacking bitcoin).
