>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.

>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).