I do appreciate some good professional FUD because even when it's not high-effort, it's at least knowledgeable of bitcoin's inner workings. Mainstream talking points almost never bother with pro FUD because it requires too much work.
Bitcoin blocks don't just reward a coinbase (block subsidy), they include transaction fees as well. The historical chart on these fees is wildly inconsistent. At plenty of times tx fees have made up 40%+ of a block reward. Miners scoop the most expensive transactions off the mempool's top to include in their block. It's called the cream. Since individuals can set their own cream when broadcasting a tx, they can get priority, if they pay a little more. The highest tx fee I've ever seen personally was $700 but, this was for a half billion dollars in BTC, meaning the fee was one tenth of 1 percent. By the same token, I've also seen BTC worth hundreds of millions on the move with fees under $10. The point is, the system is designed to incentivize miners to include transactions, Russia could be, in some telling, and quite counterintuitively, given priority designation to transactions if they spend a little more cream. Talk about the cat getting the cream, if you like puns.
Then there's the issue of mining pools. Firstly, these are not fixed organizations. Look at the history of BTC mining and you'll see most of the big pools of yesterday have either fallen from the ranks or don't even exist (Bitmain anybody?). Mining has its very own free market and economy of scale. It's just another reason (of many reasons) why Proof of Work is so superior to Proof of Stake, because a miner has to continuously expend money and resources for fewer and fewer bitcoin. At times, all miners will be unprofitable too, for infinite reasons: natural disasters, difficulty adjustment, energy price shocks, global hashpower, laws, equipment supply chains, energy credits, geopolitical, halving, green energy tech, etcetera. The free market is why blocking tx's would never work. Mining pools can up an leave to a place that won't try foisting rules. And if they did comply and tried tx blacklisting, the thousands of miners that make up their hashpower can in under 10 minutes switch their hashpower to a pool that doesn't, and with the snap of a finger, the censorious pool will be out of the top ten forever. Or they'll form new pools. Either way, the network will decentralize further. This of course all assumes that the origination of the transaction(s) is known to begin with, which they wouldn't be, not if they didn't originate from a centralized Russian exchange, didn't lever the LN, and blockchain forensics firms weren't employed. Even then exist plenty of ways around this. In the very best DoS scenario, they'd be able to block some of Russia's tx's (some large ones say) for an hour or two before a miner or pool elsewhere picked it up—maybe even their very own miners... Blocks are rewarded by whomever's hash power finds the nonce first. Having a large amount of hashpower doesn't guarantee anything. Pools can literally go days without finding the nonce and getting a block. It only guarantees that over a long time period, you should get blocks in proportion to your hashpower.
Then there's nodes. While a tx can sit in the mempool for ~48 hours before getting auto-canceled, nodes will know who mined all the previous blocks. We'll know quickly who's decided to do this (beauty of a transparent ledger and chain), and don't think for a second that we haven't already proven ourselves with segwit2x when the majority of the mining hashpower, Coinbase (the exchange), and VC's teamed up to try and break consensus rules and force larger block sizes. That was shut down quickly and the world was reminded of bitcoin's decentralized power and brilliant design. If miners or pools try DoS, first will come a very brief and public trial, probably on Twitter, Reddit, involving the Mining Council, and a few other platforms. If their rebuttals bring any whiff of dishonesty, their blocks are getting invalidated, and I'm not sure how far we would push this, but they'll get the message quickly. Most of the large US miners are publicly listed (MARA, RIOT, HUT, etc). They trade at large enough premiums they have quite a ways to fall. And they're run mostly by personalities public enough pariah status matters.
Then there's just the open source nature of the tech surrounding the Bitcoin Network. We have the Lightning Network, Discreet Log Contracts, Joinmarkets, nodes, wallets, etcetera. There would be a fix and work around in a matter of weeks, even if everything had already gone back to normal.
I don't believe for one moment it will ever come to this. Not even close, because the Bitcoin Network at large, oblivious to many, is designed assuming this type of behavior will occur. And if it does, it's designed to capture it in its even horizon, absorb it, crush it, and emerge larger, and stronger. The time for all this censorious nonsense was many years ago when bitcoin was small and fragile, when governments laughed it off as tulip mania.
Lastly, although the Bitcoin Network is neutral, I'm not. I remember years ago this headline in a south Florida newspaper I think that read:
"Cubans don’t want their grandpa’s revolution, they want jobs."
Several new generations have been been born—most of whom don’t recognize history intimately. Most of the historical transgressors are dead. The world has gone through globalization shifts. The age of information technology and connectedness is decades into our consciousness. Culture has diffused. Culture has changed. That’s why when someone sits there interested in and talking about re-unification of the old Soviet Union, as if young people should care, it’s absurd. I feel for the displaced, maimed, and injured Ukraine people. I also feel terrible for the bodies of the Russian conscripts thrown into a relic’s dream they don’t want or care about. He's a boss, not a leader. Most of these kids are not contract soldiers. They want to be part of the global economy. They want to Tinder Ukraine girls. They watch TikTok. They don’t want sanctions that destroy their future, and their children’s futures. They don’t want to be international pariahs, interlopers, cannon fodder, or vaporized in the mobile crematoriums that Russia is currently using to hide their dead on the battlefields of Ukraine.
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