The reason XBT should lengthen the coinbase maturity is not because of a reaction to Alpha Pool. It’s to better align the time preferences of those making decisions on consensus rule changes. This requires some background. For five years now we’ve wondered if mining is even profitable - Fees have disappeared - Anyone who’s bought mining equipment wishes they bought coins instead - 99% of coins have been mined - The bitaxe community sees profit as missing the point - We wonder if the only “profitable” corporate miners are those propped up by fiat funding - MARA bailed even with fiat funding. Things were different a decade ago. Clearly mining profitably part of Satoshi’s incentive model. What’s changed? Fees have disappeared due to a growth of trust in second layers and institutional paper. Sure Liquid failed but that’s small in comparison to the trend. Demand for on-chain monetary txs has dropped which has incentives arbitrary data storage. All this on top of the fact that the mining reward is a small fraction of what it used to be. Did speculation build up mining infrastructure far larger than it reasonably should have? Yes it probably overshot, but that doesn’t affect the underlying dynamic. The main issue is that miners (in aggregate) now have a shorter timescale view of what success means, compared to the hodler-node runner community (in aggregate) Sure industrial miners have large up front costs they don’t want to waste. But the monthly cash flow compared to electricity costs is their main game. Also mining hardware is dead after 5 years. The hodler/node runners are in this for life. This is world changing, forever money to them. It’s personal. It’s the only thing they trust for their retirement. These two communities are strange bed fellows to come together consensus rule changes. The reason XBT should lengthen the coinbase maturity is not because of a reaction to Alpha Pool. It’s something much deeper. Requiring a longer time before a coinbase reward becomes spendable explicitly makes the miner or pool operator think about a time in the future. Imagine coinbase maturity is lengthened to one year. The miner or pool operator is at least incentivized to care if the coin is operational a year from now. Sure that might make them struggle to meet monthly electricity bills. But only if they aren’t playing the reserve game. Feature not a bug. Perhaps that will decrease demand for mining, but I don’t think that is as important as aligning the time preferences of those trying to agree on consensus rules. TLDR - Increasing the coinbase maturity is software change that attempts to more align the time preference of miners (in aggregate) with the time preference of node-running holders (in aggregate) so that when it comes to consensus rule changes, the community is comparatively more on the same page.