Really good post, very accurate. I'd push back slightly on the claim that Moneros hash power is the reason it's vulnerable. The real reason is because the energy and compute cost is proportionally lower than Bitcoins due to the smaller market cap. The RandomX hashrate will always be lower than sha256 because it is intentionally less efficient. The real metric is energy expended, cost of hardware, and what devices are the most energy efficient. If market caps are equal, total energy expenditure is roughly equal but Monero has a more decentralized, harder to co-opt mining economy since it consists mainly of gaming PCs and botnets. "One CPU one vote" as Satoshi so famously wrote.
The Bitcoin mining environment is not "professional miners" it's Proof of ASICs in which only large corporations or governments are the only entities that can afford to compete to buy the most Bitmain ASICs due to economies of scale. This resembles a security model closer to Proof of Stake than the pure Proof of Work provided by Monero's RandomX algorithm.
Really this is the only think I can think to push back on though, overall very honest and reasonable take!
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I would push back on that.
The biggest risk for both ASIC and CPU mining is general trust in fiat currencies that enable central bank "handlers" via access to CEX to naked short/fractionally reserve the fiat price and by that control the incentives that are meant to provide enough "security budget".
Monero community needed a long term to learn about the depth of this attack so they push forcdelisting wherever possible.
Bitcoiners are findkng out about
step 1 holding a taxable coin is worthless
step 2 ETFs and custodians are meant to price suppress through fractional reserves
step 3 they'll understand how that is the most easiest and most effective way to under-mine the security budget.
Yeah I think that view complements what I've said. I was controlling for market cap, but you're absolutely correct that if we view the security budget as fiat market cap as currently its valued at in both blockchains, any fiat price dump nukes the hashrate for both.
Though, this is just a free market force, most will mine for a slight profit, and little to nobody will mine for a loss such that if mining rewards become less than electricity, you just consequently find less miners.
Maybe one day we will have true price discovery and equivalent security to match, but for now it's really tied to market cap unfortunately.