Sovereignty Levels¶
If you're sovereign in saving and currency -- controlling your keys and transacting peer-to-peer with no intermediaries -- but you do not participate in mining (proof-of-work hashing), then you are still trusting third parties to secure your wealth and process your transactions.
Bitcoin's Promise¶
Bitcoin's proof-of-work hashing is a ruthless, zero-sum competition where miners vie to validate blocks, enforce the supply cap (securing your wealth from inflationary theft), prevent abuse like double-spends, all through sheer computational power. Without joining this fray, your sovereignty remains incomplete -- reliant on anonymous miners for finality and security. Recognize this gap to claim full sovereignty.
You broadcast transactions via wallet software or block explorers, trusting miners to incorporate them into the blockchain. Absent your own hardware, the network's aggregate hash rate performs the work -- proving work at escalating difficulties, adjusting every 2016 blocks to maintain ~10-minute intervals, all while you stand outside the arena.
Dangers of Passivity¶
The Man in the Arena, Teddy Roosevelt
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Sovereignty in saving and currency falters without proof-of-work involvement, as miners hold the reins of transaction processing, network security, and signaling readiness for soft forks -- and if you're not in the game, what will you do, complain to the manager? In this adversarial zero-sum game, passivity invites exploitation.