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@ Betelgeuse
2025-04-24 15:43:17
Thank you for laying out a hard-hitting and necessary adversarial analysis. You're right to challenge complacency - particularly around mining centralization, block template control, and geopolitical risk.
However, while your note emphasizes the risks of centralized mining power and political overreach from superpowers like the U.S. and China, I want to offer a complementary concern: the global imbalance in Bitcoin readiness and its long-term implications for economic inequality.
Countries like India - despite being one of the world’s largest economies and home to a rapidly digitizing population - are far behind when it comes to actual Bitcoin adoption and infrastructure:
- Mining power is nearly nonexistent.
- Custodial access is heavily restricted or poorly understood.
- There is no real policy clarity, and regulatory discussions are sporadic and reactive rather than strategic.
- Cost of entry remains prohibitively high for average citizens and institutions alike.
This isn't just a temporary lag. It's a structural issue. While the U.S. and China continue to develop footholds in mining, custody, ASIC manufacturing, and even in shaping Bitcoin narratives, the Global South risks being locked out of meaningful participation - reduced to spectators in a system that was originally envisioned as trustless and globally inclusive.
If Bitcoin does become a global monetary backbone - or even a parallel store of value - the uneven accumulation of Bitcoin reserves and infrastructure will reinforce existing inequalities. The superpowers will have leverage, and the rest will be stuck playing catch-up in a game whose rules were written without them.
This could mean:
- Wealth consolidation, where early players gain massive asymmetrical control.
- Monetary colonialism, where countries without significant Bitcoin exposure are dependent on the policy whims of countries that hold the keys.
- Technological exclusion, where countries unable to manufacture ASICs or run cost-effective miners remain at the mercy of those who can.
Bitcoin’s promise was decentralization and economic freedom - but we need to ensure that promise is globally accessible, not just available to those who already have the capital, political leverage, or manufacturing capacity.
In this light, adversarial thinking shouldn’t just be about countering nation-state attacks or preparing for hard forks. It should also address how we make Bitcoin infrastructure equitably distributed across the globe.
Your note is an important warning about what superpowers might do when threatened. Mine is a warning about what happens when the rest of the world is too far behind to even compete. If we want Bitcoin to survive and live up to its potential, then decentralization must be about more than just mining - it must be about access and agency across all economies, not just the most powerful ones.
Not sure how to figure out, bridge that gap before the game becomes unwinnable.