Thread by @wintercooled

A short Sunday tale...
1/ A group of people find the ideal offices to work from, lovely environment, well furnished and situated close to where they all live. It's perfect. They collectively hire security guards who they pay well on a daily contract basis. All is well until...

2/ The security guards have a meeting and decide that they don't like commuting to work. They decide that the following week they won't turn up at the offices but instead will guard a different, vacant building closer to where *they* all live.

3/ They tell the happy office workers that they will need to relocate their equipment and travel to the new location or risk having no security next week. The office folk shrug and put out an advert for new security staff. "Turn up and get paid!" is the simple-to-fulfill offer.

4/ Next Monday the old security guards do as planned and are surprised that by lunchtime none of the office folk have turned up at the location the are now guarding. They go back round to the offices to see what's up and are surprised to see the security gate fully staffed.

5/ "What are you doing here?" they ask the new guards. "Getting paid" shrug the new guards.

Back to reality...
Miners that provide the service users specify get rewarded for securing the network. Thanks for that 👍 Those that don't do not get rewarded. Sorry about that 😐

6/ SW2X miners very nearly turned up to guard the "wrong office" last year. Luckily for them they remembered they like getting paid. Even luckier because the office that they were about to "guard" would have fallen down on them as the architect made a simple engineering error.

7/ Users can wait out a lack of block production longer than miners can wait out not being paid. It costs nothing to sit on a UTXO set but it costs a lot to generate what amounts to worthless strings of characters that nobody places any value on. This has always been the case.

8/ You "advertise" what you will pay for and want securing by using a node. Be wary of those that say you shouldn't run a node as they don't just want to provide security - they want to remove your ability to choose what you pay for and force you to "move".

9/ SW2X supporting businesses acted like landlords who thought they could evict their tennents en masse and also tell them where to go live. If holding your Bitcoin on their services is like renting, remember that withdrawing to your own wallet is like owning your own castle /end

10/ Addendum for the pedantic:😉Rogue miners free to switch back any time they want to get paid again. In real life Bitcoin users don't lose security of existing confirmations during the 'walk out' as the difficulty of the network remains the same, block intervals likely increase