Yeah in 8-12 years I think if price does not substantially increase so as to enable more miners to be profitable, and if fees remain similar to current day, then miners and pools are in for some trouble. Power law correlations are bullish for price, but also demonstrates how hashrate will grow proportionally, thereby impacting the variance for all miners and pools.
Only the strongest most efficient miners with lowest energy costs will survive, or they need to diversify their strategies to generate revenue. They must maximally squeeze all value out of their hashrate and minimise their costs to stay profitable. I also imagine further consolidation by pubcos and other large private miners that are closer to the money printer than the plebs miners.
The consolidation of hashrate and increasing regulatory scrutiny on Bitcoin does not bode well for censorship concerns. A substantial proportion of hashrate mining OFAC compliant blocks might doom Bitcoins censorship resistance, hence why innovation in this area is necessary.
More smaller independent pools that are globally distributed and ideologically leaning towards a censorship resistant Bitcoin is the only solution. Pools are trusted third parties that can be pressured by the state, so the more of them that exist in diverse jurisdictions the better.
