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I fail to see how "DDOS and death threats" == "democracy". All of this has been covered/talked about ad nauseam, as far as I'm concerned what this comes down t

I fail to see how "DDOS and death threats" == "democracy". All of this has been covered/talked about ad nauseam, as far as I'm concerned what this comes down to is 2 basic facts: 1. There's a core development team (with it's fair share of internal politics and power struggles) who is supposedly looking out for potential issues affecting Bitcoin's operational health. Once they agree on the change and implement it, there's no "voting" by any other players in the Bitcoin ecosystem. They just do what they think is best. 2. There's a disproportionate amount of hashing power concentrated in large mining pools. This would be bad enough but what makes it even worse is the heaviest hitters are in China and are unified against the biggest proposed change SOME of the core team members like Mike were/are advocating. So now how this standstill will resolve - remains to be seen. There are multiple factors at play but as of right now the situation isn't pretty. To claim that "this is how bitcoin is supposed to work" is to agree with Mike in saying that it is messed up beyond recognition :)

MCRed 11y ago
The voting is built into the bitcoin protocol-- the miners that find the next block are voting for the piece of software they are running. If there is a schism and some miners are running other software then two chains could -- COULD -- emerge-- but one will rapidly become the dominant one. ( for a period the two chains will effectively double everyone's bitcoins, but the losing chains coins will rapidly lose value as hashing power switches to the dominant chain.) This could be chaotic so the debate is really how to avoid two co-existing chains in hard fork situation. But bitcoin itself is, every 10 minutes, voting for what the "right" chain is, which is defined as the longest. Right now today if you're mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches.
- maaku 11y ago
  > Right now today if you're mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches. Not if the longer chain is invalid under your node's consensus rules. The rule is "most-work valid chain."
- ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
  so you're talking about 2 kinds of "voting" here: 1. Decision by the miners on what version of protocol to support; 2. Consensus on the bitcoin network where nodes vote to determine which chain is valid. "voting" I'm referring to (which there's none) is telling the core team which changes to implement. who's to tell them not to implement segwit for example?

MCRed 11y ago

The voting is built into the bitcoin protocol-- the miners that find the next block are voting for the piece of software they are running. If there is a schism and some miners are running other software then two chains could -- COULD -- emerge-- but one will rapidly become the dominant one. ( for a period the two chains will effectively double everyone's bitcoins, but the losing chains coins will rapidly lose value as hashing power switches to the dominant chain.) This could be chaotic so the debate is really how to avoid two co-existing chains in hard fork situation. But bitcoin itself is, every 10 minutes, voting for what the "right" chain is, which is defined as the longest. Right now today if you're mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches.

maaku 11y ago
> Right now today if you're mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches. Not if the longer chain is invalid under your node's consensus rules. The rule is "most-work valid chain."
ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
so you're talking about 2 kinds of "voting" here: 1. Decision by the miners on what version of protocol to support; 2. Consensus on the bitcoin network where nodes vote to determine which chain is valid. "voting" I'm referring to (which there's none) is telling the core team which changes to implement. who's to tell them not to implement segwit for example?