<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">On Sat, Jul 18, 2026 at 3:54 PM John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="tutanota_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid #93A3B8; padding-left: 10px; margin-left: 5px;"><blockquote><div dir="auto">A state actor or a well-funded attacker won't need to compete with AI data centers for top-tier energy contracts; they'll just buy up that mountain of old hardware for pennies on the dollar.<br></div></blockquote></blockquote><p><span>Agreed, and that mountain of hardware already has a socket waiting for it: the only ones able to plug it in are those with the megawatts and the infrastructure, and those are the same desks that assemble blocks today.</span><br></p><p><span>Mining has already moved from weak hands into institutional ones. The GHash story showed that 51% is not just reachable, and today block assembly sits in the hands of three or four players: Foundry 28%, F2Pool 18%, AntPool 17%, around 62% together. They have no motive to harm the network, but security is measured by capabilities, not intentions: a capability can be compelled by a court order, bought, or compromised. The neutrality of block production rests not on mathematics but on the economics and jurisdiction of three companies.</span><br></p><p><span>Censorship would not stop the network, it kills both functions in the title of the whitepaper. Payments are either not accepted or delayed in time: a transaction from a tagged address waits for the non-censoring minority of assemblers. Storage becomes censored storage: the coin cannot be taken from you, but tagged coins are already refused by exchanges today. What keeps running is something that is no longer Bitcoin in meaning: not a payment system, but a means of censored storage.</span><br></p><p><span>And then the question: what is the point of storing capital in a censorable asset? Capital that answers by leaving pushes the price down, which is the security budget, which accelerates the outflow of hash power to AI and the shrinking to even fewer desks. This loop, unlike the hashrate one, has no damper in the protocol.</span><br></p><p><span>This is not a prediction of collapse. Stratum V2 returns block assembly to miners, pools with 75% of hashrate have signed on, but real adoption is still near zero. The race between the protocol fix and the administrative habit is open.</span><br></p><div dir="auto">——<br></div><div dir="auto">Alejandro<br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">«You can’t parallelize your way out of time.»<br></div> </body>
</html>