The only real risk I see is since the global hashrate is now mostly centralized in a handful of companies' hands, one of them is going to use their hashpower to agree with some idiot regulation that censors part of the protocol for some people. I swear there was this one miner who already supported such a regulation, it was a US bill to audit bitcoin addresses made in the US and they controlled like 7% of the global hashrate, it was fairly recent too, like 1-3 years ago but I forgot their name (if anyone can find it, I will give one merit).
Personally, I don't remember anything like that happening in the US a few years ago - but what recently appeared in the media is definitely on that trail - and these are crypto miners who should work according to some pre-determined rules - which would mean that they will mine only those transactions that will be
clean.
Although there’s no clear connection between custodial rules and the Bitcoin mining industry, DCMNA isn’t taking any chances. The DCMNA is pioneering a technique it calls “clean mining,” meaning it selects which transactions to process based on wallet information instead of the most lucrative fee options. In other words, they're promising to only mine transactions that the government approves of, even if it means revenue takes a hit.
“We can tell regulators our mining pools are not doing business with child traffickers, terrorists, or miners in Iran,” Okamoto said. “We’ll lose about 0.35% of our potential business. We think that’s a small price to pay for being able to say we are the good guys, according to the U.S. Treasury... if I point my business toward Chinese pools, they might be doing business with those bad actors.”
Combined, DCMNA's two current members claim to make up almost 8 percent of the entire Bitcoin network’s hashrate. That's nothing to sniff at, and they're looking to swell their ranks with more miners willing to only process U.S. government-friendly transactions.