Except that I demostrated several reasons why that is not an economic fact; and that it's long been understood that there will be institutions willing to mine zero margin or less for other economic reasons. One of which I actually do, wchich is use the heat for zone heating in winter (roughly 15% of the network hash power is "other unknown" which I would be part of) another being the competing cartels (Walmart&McDonalds versus Target & Burger King) mining for major players in competing industries, for which finance is not tehir primary business, but is already a cost center.
Ignoring Mr. Mint's concerns for a bit, I woonder, do you, or others, believe that part of the mining sincentive will also be for wealthy establishments to simply secure their wealth? E.G. if I am rich without Bitcoin, I pay large fees to my bank and security to keep my money, gold, and other wealth safe. If I am rich with bitcoin (or even if I am a wealthy corporation that has a lot of bitcoin) and want to hedge against mining attacks and help maintain the status quo, I pay to run my own mining hardware, even if it is a small portion of the whole network, and even if I have to do it at a loss.
I'm sure we discussed this point two+ years ago, and likely every year this discussion has come up since, but what are people's opinions on this, now that mining has moved from complex GPU rigs, to simple and compact ASIC appliances?
Actually, we did discuss this exact thing in detail about two years ago, RAssah. My short answer is, of course any very well heeled individual and/or bitcoin based finance institution is going to go to great lengths to secure their own miing operations. For comparision, most consumer bank branches have very large, very expensive valut systems; even though in our modern digital age such an expense is no longer neccessary for their primary business. Bitcoin 'banking' institutions are going to compete in many different ways, and touting their hashing capacity is as much a psycological benefit for an online bitcoin bank as a time-lock safety deposit box safe is for a brick & mortor institution. Also, I expect such banks to compete by advertising their ability to offer free transactions. One might be able to offer those free transactions because the bank itself has recepriprocity agreements with major retailers such as Walmart, or they might just e able to do so by sponoring some significant mining operations of their own, similar to my Walmart example. While Walmart would do it to process their own "free" transactions at their own meatspace counters in a timely manner, actual bitcoin based financial institutions would do it as a benefit to their membership. While free transactions can be sent by anyone, only a bank with their own mining under contract can
promise that those same transactions will be processed for "free" within any time frame. It thus becomes a comparative advantage over a bank that just offered basic bitcoin banking services, and didn't sponsor their own mining gear.
Bitcoin banks offering free transactions, for their own reasons, would by itself undermine AnonyMint's transactions withholding attack theory. If numerous institutions are offering free transactions within their own limited scopes, then no cartel can develop with the premise that free transactions processing is an advantage that only a cartel member would have access to.