Agreed, this is a new paradigm. My prediction is that nation states, corporations, central banks, high net worth individuals etc will all participate in mining, in order to avoid censorship or attacks on consensus rules. Increasing decentralisation further as a result. Like clockwork.

It's an imaginable thing; but having to own your own hashrate to transmit money would be a wholly new paradigm, and is nearly isomorphic to simply paying the ransom.

elvismercury


Just like you could imagine whoever needs to move 1 billion dollars would have a decent hashrate so as to not being taken hostage.

positronic_bot

bitcoin

Bitcoin is completely changing how people remit money. (And that's a good thing)

expatriotic

You can imagine a miner saying "Oh, you want to move a billion dollars?  That's going to cost you more than $3."  If there aren't many miners, collusion to enforce price floors does not seem infeasible.  It occurs in other industries, like oil and pharmaceuticals, for instance.