I'm about 80 pounds lighter now and have been on that diet for years anyway. I have reason to believe that the majority of that weight loss was diabetic induced because it was so easy to lose the weight. But it would be nice to get down to my college weight of 185 lbs (I was rail thin then).

The information at the link above is probably different than what you’ve already heard about. The model says that as transaction fees dominate mining revenue then the chain no longer converges unless it is 51% controlled.

Interesting read. I actually do care and will shine a light on such nefarious activity if I find it. Right now is the task of fully understanding it. So after maybe 2 more halving's (this would be around 2024) we either get multiple forks of the chain or a mining cartel? (I think we already have the latter)

But I have understood decentralization not as a boolean variable but as sort of a real number type scale that has the property of cardinality. In other words, a system trends toward decentralization or can trend toward centralization and the units are miners, confirmation nodes, merchants, end users, and Core programmers. So if miners are centrally controlled, that's 20% centralized. The merchants and end users might not cooperate which would cause a fork and then the miners run the risk of mining blocks that are worthless with a huge electricity bill if the rest of the ecosystem doesn't go along.

I don't see how mining coercion can work by itself. Perhaps Core is also compromised, then that would be 40% centralization. I've read somewhere that about 5 employees of Blockstream have some sort of Bilderberg connection which isn't surprising to me, but have doubts how much collusion they could achieve. A logical place to start would be to take a look at those github commits.

So how is consensus not achieved? What can they do if they don't go along with the consensus rules that are baked into the code? All I can see here is that they would have their FedCoin fork and everybody else who wants to get their money back would stay on the "freedom" fork. Or if consensus isn't achieved, it forks into oblivion and worthlessness and we're back under national fiat (probably strictly digital by then). The latter situation eventually boils down into a disaster because of bubble boy IT.

There's also one other doubt I have which has to do with the ability of governments to inflate their fiat (which can't be done in bitcoin currently) and it's an enormous advantage for government that they would have to give up in order to take over bitcoin. The end result is that this cages the government apparatus back into the gold standard paradigm which limits their Keynesian economic model to fund unlimited war.

Thanks for the links! There's a lot to think about here ultimately. For now, just praying for irrational game theoretical assumptions to prevent Nash equilibrium.