Needing to fund devs for fee maximization puts smaller miners at a disadvantage because they can't fund devs. After enough time passes with such a fee gap, smaller miners go extinct.
Did I get that right? Sorry if this is obvious, but for some reason the point seems very subtle to me.
Yes, correct. Small miners would need to rely on 1 or a handful of entities that were specialists. This would be a very strong centralization effect on bitcoin and would effectively create permissioned bitcoin mining as you'd need to register with one of these entities in order to be competitive as a miner.
Then, these handful of entities could effectively dictate the rules of bitcoin in the future and censorship-resistance would be lost.
Hard to see how bitcoin would have much value if only a few entities had this much power.
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