I used the term 'permission-minimized.' How many times has someone been prevented from spending their coins? None that I am aware of. It's just another theoretical attack that doesn't work in practice.
Either it is or it isn't [permissionless]
I dunno; that doesn't seem like a useful way to look at it. By similar logic, could one not state:
Either Blockchain signatures are forgeable or unforgeableand then, since there's a 1 in 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542975 odds of picking a private key that will allow you to forge a signature, conclude that:
Blockchain signatures are forgeable It's technically true, but practically useless.
Anyways, is this not just semantics? According to my definition, Bitcoin is permissionless. If it ever becomes non-permissionless, then it would cease being Bitcoin. Maybe that's a more useful way to look at it. The question then becomes, will it ever stop being bitcoin?
I thought Adrian-X made a great comment about this (riffing on the point ZB often makes, and the point Cypherdoc makes above):
Bitcoin does what the economic majority want, the only question in my mind is does the economic majority want to adopt the immutable rules of Bitcoin, or does the economic majority want to tweak the rules by manipulating politics.
Does the ecomonic majority want permissionless, borderless bitcoin or something else?
There is no "practical uselessness" to this property of the bitcoin system in anything like the way you present with your comparison; there is no similarity in the logic at all. One is a question of statistical probability of guessing a number from an impracticably sized domain. And the resolution depends only on the math. The other has nothing to do with any branch of mathematics at all, it's about decisions made by humans, dependent only on social or moral values. I do not take your comparison seriously, Peter.
And you're saying the same thing that anyone else seems to: that because miners do not and have not censored transactions, they never will. This is clearly not the case, and I would argue it's an unwise assumption.