A healthy mining market is vital to the longevity of Bitcoin. Last year, amid low blockspace demand, Bitcoin’s biggest miners began to merge mine for extra fees. While exploration has its place, this hints that without issuance, miners in need of revenue will destabilize Bitcoin by embracing worse forms of expressivity. Given this, we found ourselves asking: How would different forms of expressivity alter Bitcoin’s prospects for stability? In particular, how would expressivity and fees change its mining market, which is dominated by just five pools?

Without embracing secure, egalitarian avenues for miners to earn revenue, Bitcoin slow-walks toward PoW-based expressivity. At best, this means merge mining and Metaprotocols; at worst, it means the collapse of stability and censorship resistance as re-orgs drive centralization. Obviously, some fixes (such as tail issuance) are out of the question. Our view — built on Ethereum’s history — is that opcodes can strengthen Bitcoin by injecting safe fee variance and new pool-level accountability.

"the terminal concern for Bitcoin is mining sustainability. All other issues, including value accrual, reorgs or other attacks, and network stability, are downstream of miner stability and miner economics."

The siloed nature of private channels and the inability of miners to act independently of or verify large pools suggests pooling will fracture as issuance zeros. In tandem, without inflation (no, tail issuance is not a fix) and without democratic fee sharing, hashrate will drop and consolidate.

If Bitcoin wants to cross the chasm from digital store of value or gold equivalent to electronic peer-to-peer cash, opening the door to utility that unlocks even-handed satsflow to miners is critical.

_ BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com._