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> The Bitcoin network has unfortunately not been owned by the people, but instead dominated by Chinese miners with ASICs. This is not the ownership I'm talking
by natrius 11y ago
> The Bitcoin network has unfortunately not been owned by the people, but instead dominated by Chinese miners with ASICs.
This is not the ownership I'm talking about. It doesn't matter who gets the reward for a particular transaction. What matters is how many people are validating the transactions to ensure that no one is putting fraudulent data into a blockchain's database. Those Chinese miners that comprise 70% of the hashrate have no power to dictate which transactions are valid and which aren't. If they try to incorporate invalid transactions, they will be ignored.
- Jasper_ 11y agoSomething has to validate transactions. If miners don't do it, who else will? Clients run by users won't, because they can't store the 50GB-and-ever-growing blockchain locally. They simply use the SPV protocol, which trusts that somebody else has validated the chain for them. As you can tell by the bitcoin.org alert, it was a serious issue that miners stopped validating transactions, because lots of wallets blindly trusted the longest chain, which was actually invalid. The majority hashrate can effectively determine the longest chain, and thus, most wallet implementations out there. Even if the wallets start doing limited validation, the Chinese miners could always exclude specific transactions they don't like.