6 ms·

That's the cool part about consesus, if the majority of miners disagree with the fork, even the founder himself can't do anything about it.

aakilfernandes 10y ago
Thats actually not how hard forks work. If the nodes run by the exchanges, the "economic majority", decide to fork, pretty much everyone else has to follow. Miners don't really have a say.
- jaekwon 10y ago
  In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say. It's just that they're incentivized to do what the "economic majority" has to say, otherwise the economic majority can choose to hard-fork the mining algo (requiring a change in hardware investment), or, can switch to PoS, say. http://tendermint.com/blog/on-thedao-and-blockchain-governance/ http://tendermint.com/blog/on-thedao-and-blockchain-governan...
  - aakilfernandes 10y ago
    That would be a soft fork. For hard forks, the miners have very little input. http://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks http://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks
    - jaekwon 10y ago
      Well, if you don't find a new mining algo that requires investment in new hardware, a blockchain with a minority of mining power behind it is vulnerable to the major chain. So nobody will use it, unless they didn't know what they were doing. So the miners do have quite a bit of say. Depends on what your strategy for hard-forking the PoW algo is. Or, you need to understand PoS. It's in the blog post. Read it :P
      - curiousgal 10y ago
        Dude, he wrote the blog post. lol But you do make a good point, miners are centric to the platform. However, they have to all agree in order to make their opinion matter. Which requires a very strong opposition to the hard fork, in this case the hard fork is the best option so they'll agree either ways.
      - rlbaker 10y ago
        He wrote it...
      - aakilfernandes 10y ago
        Hey, admittedly I responded without reading your blog post. Sorry about that. In my defense, I've spent a lot of time on /r/ethereum where a lot of people think that 51% of miners are capable of changing the protocol. Could you elaborate on the issue, I take it you're referring to this > In a proof-of-work blockchain, nobody rational would follow a fork with less than 50% of the mining power behind it because it would be vulnerable to attack by anonymous miners unless there were also a change in the hashing algorithm that required an investment in different kinds of hardware.
        jaekwon 10y ago
        51% can, but 49% can't, because the 51% can attack the 49% easily, using the 49% rules, on the 49% chain. So 49% of miners can't force a protocol change, unless the community (majority economy) can also agree on which PoW algo (with different hardware requirements) or PoS algo to hard fork to.
        reddytowns 10y ago
        Good point. But let's say we have Chain A with 51% and Chain B with 49%. If the miners on Chain A want to attack Chain B, they'd have to move their computing power onto Chain B. In which case the miners from Chain B, could attack Chain A while they're busy doing their attack on Chain B. In the end, it would be MAD (mutually assured destruction) unless the miners from one chain had enough to defend theirs while attacking the other. For that you'd need at least 66.6(repeating, of course)% miners on Chain A with half of those able and willing to perform an attack on Chain B. I think this would be hard to achieve.
  - nullc 10y ago
    > In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say. This simply is not true. The hard protocol rules _define_ who is and who isn't a miner. If you violate the rules the system's participants are enforcing, you're not a miner anymore as far as the protocol is concerned.
    - jaekwon 10y ago
      They're both true. A minority-miner pow-chain quickly loses credibility. If say a 67% coalition of miners say that a hard-fork will not happen, then the 33% coalition of miners are in a bind, even if the exchanges choose to support the 33% -- which they won't, because it's too vulnerable to double-spend attacks. Ergo, the minority-miner pow-chain must either also hard-fork the mining algorithm (to require investment in new hardware), or hard-fork to a non-PoW system. I do understand your definition of a hard-fork. What I'm talking about is a protocol-extrinsic, cryptoeconomic justification of my argument. There's a game of chicken involved, for example.
darawk 10y ago
True, but the core developers still have an outsized impact on the miners decision.
mjfl 10y ago
Well there is a small caveat in this case. The majority of the people doing the mining run on clients that are hosted on just a few github repositories that are run by the main development team. If the developers push changes to these repos implementing the soft/hard fork... yes it is theoretically possible for these miners to reject the changes and continue on mining using the old clients but what is probably going to happen is that practically everyone is going to update to the new client and accept the forks as a patch. This is for the simple reason that most people want to keep their clients up to date and have no strong opinions on the matter. This way the development team can turn every "I don't care" vote into a "fork" vote. The idealization of independent miners is for all practical purposes an illusion.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Yes moreover the miners do care. About their profits. And not wasting electricity. Their best bet is to mine on the most likely successful codebase, which will be the core developer's code. Even if they disagree with their change!
- woah 10y ago
  This has been proven wrong many times in Bitcoin and Ethereum
noshbrinken 10y ago
I keep seeing this idea invoked over and over again, and it's starting to bug me. The problem with this idea is that it conflates technical decentralization and the spirit or ideals of decentralization. The latter can be betrayed or degraded even while the former is preserved. Just because the miners aren't compelled by the network architecture to implement a fork doesn't mean that there aren't social dynamics which have the effect of centralizing decisions made by those miners. "Consensus" doesn't have any inherent value or rightness. Consensus is just a majority of a group electing to do something. In the world of the decentralized web, consensus is positive only when network nodes are truly acting autonomously. It's best when this means that each node acts in self-interest, without regard for or in ignorance of the interests or positions of the other nodes. This is not what's happening on the Ethereum network. There's a huge amount of coordination. Ethereum is a network that hasn't individuated itself from a relatively small group of creators/maintainers/community members. As long as the network depends on these people for strength and stability, the miners will be biased to carry out the wishes of those people. Otherwise the miners risk losing whatever value they've accrued through their work. So yes, the fork only happens through a consensus of the miners. But it hasn't been established that the miners are capable of independent action.
- andrepd 10y ago
  But what's your point? Ethereum is not decentralised because... there are social dynamics? What do you want to do about it? The protocol is decentralised, the technology is completely agnostic to anything but the will of the majority. Of course there will be social dynamics and people will discuss things and read things and coordinate and influence one another. That does not invalidate the whole thing.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    I think the point they're making is that there's this common "Fallacy of the Census", which is like an appeal to popularity. By only saying that the problems will sort themselves out because a census controls the network doesn't address the other factors that can be influencing the decisions of the majority. Essentially a census-controlled network isn't infallible (i.e. bitcoin block size debate).
vkou 10y ago
Outside of crypto-anarchist circles, there's nothing cool about a 'democracy' where the only people who can vote are those who own the means of production.
- soconfused1 10y ago
  Outside of rich investors who lost money and what it back you mean. Yeah plutocracies are pretty much bullshit in any circle of people who are not already rich.
dangero 10y ago
There's a conflicting argument happening in relation to the DAO incident: 1. Users can't be expected to know the ins and outs of the contract and its ramifications so they should not lose their investment due to the exploited contract bug. 2. Miners are autonomous and can run whatever software they want. They make technical decisions about which code changes to accept on their own. The only way I see to accept both arguments is to assume that miners are all highly technical while your current average users are not, but that seems like a stretch to me. The truth is that miners run the software that they think is most likely to benefit them financially and that is the one that is being championed by the biggest public faces of the community.
kbody 10y ago
That's a bit of an illusion though. In theory miners have a choice, but until there is an alternative with some kind of authority and following, then they are in danger of losing money by not using the new version of the de facto client which most will use unless the devs go as far as to hardcore the transfer of all funds to their own address. Since miners are in for the money, usually they don't care about anything else as we see from other cryptocurrencies. Also, don't mistake consensus of miners to consensus of users of the network, which is the biggest problem with most cryptocurrencies (BTS did well on that part).

aakilfernandes 10y ago

Thats actually not how hard forks work. If the nodes run by the exchanges, the "economic majority", decide to fork, pretty much everyone else has to follow. Miners don't really have a say.

jaekwon 10y ago
In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say. It's just that they're incentivized to do what the "economic majority" has to say, otherwise the economic majority can choose to hard-fork the mining algo (requiring a change in hardware investment), or, can switch to PoS, say. http://tendermint.com/blog/on-thedao-and-blockchain-governance/ http://tendermint.com/blog/on-thedao-and-blockchain-governan...
- aakilfernandes 10y ago
  That would be a soft fork. For hard forks, the miners have very little input. http://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks http://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks
  - jaekwon 10y ago
    Well, if you don't find a new mining algo that requires investment in new hardware, a blockchain with a minority of mining power behind it is vulnerable to the major chain. So nobody will use it, unless they didn't know what they were doing. So the miners do have quite a bit of say. Depends on what your strategy for hard-forking the PoW algo is. Or, you need to understand PoS. It's in the blog post. Read it :P
    - curiousgal 10y ago
      Dude, he wrote the blog post. lol But you do make a good point, miners are centric to the platform. However, they have to all agree in order to make their opinion matter. Which requires a very strong opposition to the hard fork, in this case the hard fork is the best option so they'll agree either ways.
    - rlbaker 10y ago
      He wrote it...
    - aakilfernandes 10y ago
      Hey, admittedly I responded without reading your blog post. Sorry about that. In my defense, I've spent a lot of time on /r/ethereum where a lot of people think that 51% of miners are capable of changing the protocol. Could you elaborate on the issue, I take it you're referring to this > In a proof-of-work blockchain, nobody rational would follow a fork with less than 50% of the mining power behind it because it would be vulnerable to attack by anonymous miners unless there were also a change in the hashing algorithm that required an investment in different kinds of hardware.
      - jaekwon 10y ago
        51% can, but 49% can't, because the 51% can attack the 49% easily, using the 49% rules, on the 49% chain. So 49% of miners can't force a protocol change, unless the community (majority economy) can also agree on which PoW algo (with different hardware requirements) or PoS algo to hard fork to.
        reddytowns 10y ago
        Good point. But let's say we have Chain A with 51% and Chain B with 49%. If the miners on Chain A want to attack Chain B, they'd have to move their computing power onto Chain B. In which case the miners from Chain B, could attack Chain A while they're busy doing their attack on Chain B. In the end, it would be MAD (mutually assured destruction) unless the miners from one chain had enough to defend theirs while attacking the other. For that you'd need at least 66.6(repeating, of course)% miners on Chain A with half of those able and willing to perform an attack on Chain B. I think this would be hard to achieve.
- nullc 10y ago
  > In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say. This simply is not true. The hard protocol rules _define_ who is and who isn't a miner. If you violate the rules the system's participants are enforcing, you're not a miner anymore as far as the protocol is concerned.
  - jaekwon 10y ago
    They're both true. A minority-miner pow-chain quickly loses credibility. If say a 67% coalition of miners say that a hard-fork will not happen, then the 33% coalition of miners are in a bind, even if the exchanges choose to support the 33% -- which they won't, because it's too vulnerable to double-spend attacks. Ergo, the minority-miner pow-chain must either also hard-fork the mining algorithm (to require investment in new hardware), or hard-fork to a non-PoW system. I do understand your definition of a hard-fork. What I'm talking about is a protocol-extrinsic, cryptoeconomic justification of my argument. There's a game of chicken involved, for example.

darawk 10y ago

True, but the core developers still have an outsized impact on the miners decision.

mjfl 10y ago

Well there is a small caveat in this case. The majority of the people doing the mining run on clients that are hosted on just a few github repositories that are run by the main development team. If the developers push changes to these repos implementing the soft/hard fork... yes it is theoretically possible for these miners to reject the changes and continue on mining using the old clients but what is probably going to happen is that practically everyone is going to update to the new client and accept the forks as a patch. This is for the simple reason that most people want to keep their clients up to date and have no strong opinions on the matter. This way the development team can turn every "I don't care" vote into a "fork" vote. The idealization of independent miners is for all practical purposes an illusion.

bbcbasic 10y ago
Yes moreover the miners do care. About their profits. And not wasting electricity. Their best bet is to mine on the most likely successful codebase, which will be the core developer's code. Even if they disagree with their change!
woah 10y ago
This has been proven wrong many times in Bitcoin and Ethereum

noshbrinken 10y ago

I keep seeing this idea invoked over and over again, and it's starting to bug me. The problem with this idea is that it conflates technical decentralization and the spirit or ideals of decentralization. The latter can be betrayed or degraded even while the former is preserved. Just because the miners aren't compelled by the network architecture to implement a fork doesn't mean that there aren't social dynamics which have the effect of centralizing decisions made by those miners. "Consensus" doesn't have any inherent value or rightness. Consensus is just a majority of a group electing to do something. In the world of the decentralized web, consensus is positive only when network nodes are truly acting autonomously. It's best when this means that each node acts in self-interest, without regard for or in ignorance of the interests or positions of the other nodes. This is not what's happening on the Ethereum network. There's a huge amount of coordination. Ethereum is a network that hasn't individuated itself from a relatively small group of creators/maintainers/community members. As long as the network depends on these people for strength and stability, the miners will be biased to carry out the wishes of those people. Otherwise the miners risk losing whatever value they've accrued through their work. So yes, the fork only happens through a consensus of the miners. But it hasn't been established that the miners are capable of independent action.

andrepd 10y ago
But what's your point? Ethereum is not decentralised because... there are social dynamics? What do you want to do about it? The protocol is decentralised, the technology is completely agnostic to anything but the will of the majority. Of course there will be social dynamics and people will discuss things and read things and coordinate and influence one another. That does not invalidate the whole thing.
- bduerst 10y ago
  I think the point they're making is that there's this common "Fallacy of the Census", which is like an appeal to popularity. By only saying that the problems will sort themselves out because a census controls the network doesn't address the other factors that can be influencing the decisions of the majority. Essentially a census-controlled network isn't infallible (i.e. bitcoin block size debate).

vkou 10y ago

Outside of crypto-anarchist circles, there's nothing cool about a 'democracy' where the only people who can vote are those who own the means of production.

soconfused1 10y ago
Outside of rich investors who lost money and what it back you mean. Yeah plutocracies are pretty much bullshit in any circle of people who are not already rich.

dangero 10y ago

There's a conflicting argument happening in relation to the DAO incident: 1. Users can't be expected to know the ins and outs of the contract and its ramifications so they should not lose their investment due to the exploited contract bug. 2. Miners are autonomous and can run whatever software they want. They make technical decisions about which code changes to accept on their own. The only way I see to accept both arguments is to assume that miners are all highly technical while your current average users are not, but that seems like a stretch to me. The truth is that miners run the software that they think is most likely to benefit them financially and that is the one that is being championed by the biggest public faces of the community.

kbody 10y ago

That's a bit of an illusion though. In theory miners have a choice, but until there is an alternative with some kind of authority and following, then they are in danger of losing money by not using the new version of the de facto client which most will use unless the devs go as far as to hardcore the transfer of all funds to their own address. Since miners are in for the money, usually they don't care about anything else as we see from other cryptocurrencies. Also, don't mistake consensus of miners to consensus of users of the network, which is the biggest problem with most cryptocurrencies (BTS did well on that part).