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What happens when V.B. has too many hard fork decisions to make, or even delegate to his Foundation Lieutenants? I bet you non-ironically have uttered "just th

• Dylan16807 10y ago
  "Just this once" would be the stupidest idea in the world, preserving neither principle. I don't even know who VB is. I only care about this from a technological perspective. But presumably such a drastic action would not be happening often, if you have to get most of the network to vote. Was there something that gives a ruling council the ability to override miners? If not I think you're being unreasonable in the way you're criticizing.
  • pyskell 10y ago
    Due to the nature of mining on Ethereum (and most cryptocurrencies) you do not need the consent of many. Miners work in pools, and it's up to the pool operators to make decisions for a hard fork. In the case of Ethereum it took about 4 or 5 mining pools to reach majority (over 51% of network hashing power). A great deal of miners simply leave their mining rigs running and didn't make a decision either way. Miners largely do not care about any cryptocurrency. They will, understandably, mine whatever is most profitable. Miners also depend heavily on ping times and the total mining power of their pools. With 15 second block times every millisecond counts to make sure you're the first with the right block and get your reward. There was really no time for anti-fork mining pools to get setup well and it takes months for a pool to amass an attractive amount of miner hashing power. Overall the vote was about 5% for the fork, 1% against, and 94% abstaining. Ideally it would take a true 51% to change the network.