The “security budget” idea suggests that miners need a cash flow incentive to support their role as a double spend protector. The logic here assumes miners are not also the users of Bitcoin as money, and instead are simply using their skill to acquire microchip and electricity contracts at size, as the highest bidder, regardless of the users purpose for the silicon and electrons. This worldview can be seen in all aspects of the fiat world, for example where children are treated as wards of the state and should learn the ways of the world not by their mother and father but instead by state sanctioned strangers of a public school system that assume people can just be programmed to do whatever the state thinks is best for them rather than what would actually be best for the children. And what is best is obviously teaching them (1) securing the means of production of the necessities of life for themselves and their community (ie food water shelter energy and fixed supply money) and (2) securing the means to fulfill their biological necessities (procreation). Instead these things are after thoughts because the state and its corporate interests need instead obedient tax cattle and mindless wage slaves, respectively. That is certainly one world view, but it is entirely at odds with the underlying world view of Bitcoin, which is that the users of money aught to have the ability to secure the means of their own monetary network as they see fit. And from this world view miners then are not an amoral security budget question but instead are a user driven security question, where the “cash flows” of operations is not derived from block rewards but rather from the monetary soundness of the protocol they enforce. The block rewards are simply a small technical seigniorage solution for the networks bootstrapping. And it is in this light that Andreas Antonopoulos so poetically and famously explained the necessity and equally important the capability of the network to hard fork into a new proof of work should such a circumstance arise requiring such a nuclear option to be executed. Hard fork Creasy explains the current mental state of the sha256’ers perfectly: “The emotional and physical investment in btc for years on end will not allow most to see the truth of how bitcoin just defended itself against centralization and executed its only path out of it via monetary maxis.” And in a recent video post you, JD, illuminated the community sentiment that supports this pow fork, and I’m paraphrasing, your video was fantastic, but if I could distill it down to three primary themes: (1) we are not here to negotiate, we are here to complete the task of building Bitcoin, a user based monetary network, regardless of the personal sacrifice required because (2) our eyes are wide open, we fully understand the job which we have taken upon which is the up ending of the fiat worldview, to supplant it with a righteous and just new means of cultural order, thus, obviously, we are going to therefore piss off the most powerful people in the most privileged positions of power as we completely undermine their way of business, namely the disjointed amoral business of treating people as objects for the purpose of generating cash flows for themselves through rent seeking via idea monopolization by the brutal and immoral means of violent coercion, and misguided high time preferenced stupidity. And finally because (3) the cost of building good things requires self sacrifice, that the quality of the goodness built is equal to the courageousness applied. And let me tell you something, my brothers, we’ve got a global legion of the most courageous and morally based people on the planet at our sides in this fight, and we won’t quit until the job is done. Strength and Honor. 🧡🫡