I believe I disagree with this article's argument, but not it's conclusion. The conclusion is that home mining is awesome and more people should do it. The argument is that home mining alter the dynamics of industrial mining. (Skip to the argument if you don't want to read SoloSatoshi's rather long introduction).

Here are some numbers that SoloSatoshi presents:

There are an estimated 300 million Bitcoin holders worldwide, representing roughly 3.7% of the global population. The current Bitcoin network hashrate sits near 900 EH/s. If just 1% of those holders, three million people, each ran a small miner at 5 TH/s, they would collectively produce 15 EH/s. That is already more hashpower than several mid-sized mining pools, enough to find roughly two to three blocks per day. Scale that to 10% of holders, thirty million people, and the collective output reaches 150 EH/s, over 14% of the entire network, producing more than twenty blocks per day, or roughly one block every seventy minutes. That is a block found by an independent, censorship-resistant home miner more than twenty times every single day.

These are very compelling numbers! However, they feel a little like a sleep tracker app startup saying their TAM is the whole world because everybody sleeps. Any world there are 3 million BitAxes is already a pretty dramatically different place than the one in which we live. I don't know how many BitAxes get manufactured every year, but I suspect it's closer to 1000 than 100,000.

So, the more interesting question is what does running a home miner do for you or the Bitcoin network regardless of the prevalence of home mining in the greater network.

Here is how SoloSatoshi describes it:

You would not buy a house and then refuse to pay for a lock on the front door. Running a small miner is the lock. It is not charity. It is not a donation to the cause. It is the rational act of protecting the network in which your wealth resides. It is self-interest of the highest order.

This is an interesting question: what are the effects of a small miner who never (or very very rarely) finds blocks?

If I have had a BitAxe running in my garage for the last year but it hasn't found a block, is my Bitcoin more secure? Is it like having a lock on my stash?

Well, perhaps we could measure some very tiny increase in the proof of work requirement to mine a block that would not exist if my BitAxe wasn't running, although with hashrate as high as it is, I question whether it is actually measurable.

But mining is a zero sum game: the whole block reward for any given block only goes to the miner who finds the block; it is not doled out proportionally to all the hashrate. The result is that if you plug in a miner but happened to be singularly unlucky and didn't find a block for five years and gave up, I suspect your real effect on the network was...nil.

This is the part of SoloSatoshi's argument I question: is there a real world scenario where solominers actually play a role in overcoming a miner or mining pool like Foundry? I am skeptical. Perhaps I am wrong, though: if large miners continued to pivot to AI compute, and the world changes quite a bit, I suppose solomining could become a meaningful share of hashrate...it just doesn't feel like it's gonna happen because everybody buys a BitAxe.

The other interesting thing I found in the article was this statement:

The economic penalty for excluding a transaction is negligible right now. The financial incentive that Satoshi designed as a safeguard against censorship has, for the moment, gone quiet.

I don't think the absolute level of transaction fees is relevant. Whether the average fee rate is 0.1 sats/vbyte or 1000 sats/vbyte, what is relevant for censorship resistance is whether some transactions have to pay more than others.

If most miners are excluding a certain kind of transaction, it may well be possible that the fee market is minimal or it could be healthy. The fee market produces censorship resistance when it benefits miners who are not part of the censoring pool. If "the financial incentive that satoshi designed as a safeguard against censorship has, for the moment, gone quiet" it's because there isn't much censorship happening (or because the network is completely captured).