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Notice in Bitcoin the new coin production schedule is designed such that rate of increase is declining and the total supply is designed to never exceed 21 million BTC coins. However, IMO that is myopic because the mining is already centralized and if the government takes over, there is no limit to what they might do with the protocol. I argued that more upthread or in the past, where I said once the masses dominate the coin userbase, they really don't care as long as they get their debt and Walmart goodies.
Bitcoin mining is global. If somehow the government took over the major miners in the United States and forced them to change the protocol, wouldn't that just create a forked coin which people could choose not to use and instead keep using the real Bitcoin which is still mined throughout the rest of world and by smaller miners in the United States? For your scenario to play out, a total government takeover of the Internet (far more severe than the Great Firewall) and well as blanket observation and control of all commerce would be required. Even if it were technically possible for this regime to carry out this kind of extreme totalitarianism, I do not think it has the political capital and economic resources to do it. Nor do I think they are stupid enough to try. Power will adapt to Bitcoin, not destroy it.
Circle CEO apparently
disagrees and says the G20 will cooperate. I have also provided citations upthread about G20 declarations on their plans to cooperate.
Two or three pools control > 50% of the hash rate. That isn't the entire internet. That is only three businesses that have to be raided.
The masses won't care. Who is going to support your fork? You won't even have a majority of mining hash rate.As for individual miners switching to another pool upon that event, note one miner in East Washington had already 6 - 7% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate and is aiming to reach 10%. ASICs concentrate mining power and this will continue to get worse.
The one that is modified by government mandate to issue additional coins and have white/blacklists would be the fork, even if it has more hashing power, not the original Bitcoin protocol. Why do you think everyone would adopt the government-mutilated fork? People can still use Litecoin and Dogecoin even though they have less hashing power. In those cases, they are the clones; in the case you describe, the government version, even with more hashing power, would be the massively inferior imitator.
Because the masses don't care. They shop at websites, not via a downloadable Bitcoin client. The Amazons, Walmarts, etc.. will follow the government's regulation to send transactions only through regulated pools. The smaller retailers follow because they dependent on the larger ones and/or fearful of government enforcement, and the larger ones follow because they are the multinationals who benefit from their symbiotic control over the government.
I think we all agree the masses don't care. Which is why, in order to avoid this situation, an alt cpu only coin is a necessary way to "opt out" of the current system and the downward spiral it is heading towards. That said, there will come a time in the future, when all this is behind us, that the masses will finally come around and adopt this decentralized "knowledge age" cpu coin. Maybe not a year or five years from now, but eventually.
So what happens then, when the masses are all running there own little personal miners and contributing to the network? How are updates made and distributed to the network?
If it is true that the masses either don't care or are too stupid to care, doesn't that again pose the same threat of having the masses unknowingly adopting code that goes against their own interests? They will ultimately still be the majority. How many people will update their clients without fully understanding what it is they're updating. How easily could something counterproductive towards our goals be distributed in this way, getting the majority to consent to it without even realizing or caring? While it would be harder to corrupt than bitcoin (which the masses will welcome with open arms when the time comes), it seems to me that there is still ultimately still a threat there simply because the masses will control the majority of the network. No, there won't be any one individual who can be corrupted, but combined, the ignorant and indifferent will still pose a threat, no?