The bet is that this beautiful combo can overcome human corruption, or at the very least, navigate around it.
Ok, that's the bet. But we need to actually do something about it when faced with pools like F2Pool which are enforcing said corruption. Simply expressing out displeasure will achieve nothing. So the question is - what are we going to do? I would favor more privacy on the base layer making this kind of censorship impossible. I am very clearly in the minority here and this is highly unlikely to ever happen. So what other options are there beyond doing nothing and waiting for the day the government controls bitcoin?
Whenever there is a door to be kicked down, the governments will kick it down.
This summarizes it perfectly.
The government want bitcoin to be under their control. There is currently a route which we can foresee to the government achieving this (get 51% of the hashrate to comply with their blacklists and censorship). The government are not going to stop kicking down doors until they achieve their goal, unless we do something to stop them. Shaking our fists and hoping for the best is insufficient.
It's kind of like using CEX. If you store your coins there and the CEX owner freezes them, that doesn't mean Bitcoin is vulnerable. It means you used Bitcoin wrong.
The difference is I can simply refuse to use any CEX as I always have done and there is nothing they can do to my coins or my transactions. I hold no such power when it comes to mining pools deciding to censor me.
When it comes to other options, I've spoken before about Stratum V2, and with perfect timing I see this news story pop up:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/demand-launches-worlds-first-stratum-v2-bitcoin-mining-poolA key feature of Stratum V2 is its empowerment of individual miners to construct their own block templates. Traditionally, mining pool operators wielded control over transaction selection, posing centralization risks vulnerable to potential regulatory pressures for transaction censorship. Stratum V2 now grants mining pool users the autonomy to select transactions for block inclusion, fostering a more decentralized network resistant to censorship.