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I'm not saying they'd be 1-to-1 off the bat. I'm asking do forks have their own supply, and are no longer limited by the supply of the previous coin? If so, my

I'm not saying they'd be 1-to-1 off the bat. I'm asking do forks have their own supply, and are no longer limited by the supply of the previous coin? If so, my question is when BTC runs out of things to mine a) why would miners that needed to process transactions even stick around hashing and not just go to the fork where they could actually make money? b) and doesn't this just mean technically you could create widely accepted fork from a major crypto like BTC, have a 0% transaction cost between each and essentially have them level out using purchasing power parity...basically just extending the initial money supply by making transaction costs 0 between the parent and the fork? Since cryptos aren't based on economic strength, or trade imbalances like fiat currencies, it seems you'd just easily be able to eventually make them hit parity for the mere sake of keeping computers (miners) around to verify transactions. Bitcoin and others like it I feel are going to become far more centralized than people think, otherwise I don't see who the hell is going to use their computing power to verify transactions...which is really what miners are doing. Maybe I'm missing something.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> when BTC runs out of things to mine a) why would miners that needed to process transactions even stick around hashing Bitcoin is designed with transaction fees for miners which in principle can replace block rewards as an incentive for hashing.
sebastos 9y ago
Everything about Bitcoin is driven by emergent consensus. This includes the mining - there is no underlying fundamental mathematical entity that is being discovered or exhausted when people are “mining”. The only reason there is said to be a limited number of Bitcoin available is, well... because everyone says so! All Bitcoin clients agree that it is correct and proper to award yourself 25BTC when you mine a block. Since we all agree that’s ok, we all happily build on top of blocks that do this. We ignore blocks that try to break the rules by awarding themselves more. Eventually we will all suddenly change our mind and only associate with blocks that award the miner 12.5BTC, and then 6.25, etc until it reaches zero. That is the total extent to which the supply of BTC is limited. It’s completely driven by that wide social consensus. If you tried to start a fork built off of older blocks with a bunch of your miner buddies, it would essentially be a 51% attack. You’d have to convince a quorum of miners and users to treat ledger entries in your fork like real Bitcoin transactions. If you have the power to do that, you have successfully attacked the network, and you may as well have just sat your new blocks with mining rewards on top of the extant main chain. It’s not like mining older blocks gives you more BTC in some mathematical sense - you’re always just earning whatever you think the network will let you get away with, based on the schedule that has been agreed upon a priori. Hopefully this makes it clear that the question of whether a fork has a separate supply is confused. Neither the main nor the fork have a true finite supply - just a finite amount people will in practice agree to letting you mine. In the case of the fork, it doesnt’t matter whether you can convince them to let you go back to increased mining reward, because you have a much larger problem - nobody considers any transaction in the fork money in the first place. If at any time they do, you’ve attacked the network. Miners and users both equally dislike a state of the world where there is more than 1 version of history - it calls into question whether any wealth they have in chain A is real now that chain B is more popular. In practice they will quickly coalesce into considering one chain the true one, and changing everybody’s mind, especially long after the transactions have settled, would be a monumental task. Because everybody understands this, nobody would even try it, since it’s a waste of precious mining resources. This is why you didn’t see rogue forks forming when the reward decreased from 50 to 25 BTC. I know that’s a wall of text, but feel free to keep asking questions if you’re interested.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > Everything about Bitcoin is driven by emergent consensus. ...which is a fancy word for a speculative bubble.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    Actually, what he was doing was explaining the concept of how nodes enforce nakamoto consensus in order to validate transactions. It had absolutely zero to do with valuation.
  - sebastos 9y ago
    Well, yes, just like the emergent consensus that US dollars are worth real goods and services. Nothing is “worth” something unless people say it is. There are plenty of problems with Bitcoin as a currency, but the fact that its value is derived from speculation is not one of them. All currency is like this.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  How does this square with, for instance, the Bitcoin Cash fork? Bitcoin Cash fulfills most of the "attack" as you've described, but it still trades as money.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    The social consensus, in this age of the world works in such a way that one of the few (but not sole) ways in which you can convince people to go along with your attack/fork is to put forward technical (including economic) arguments about why the rules should be done differently and ask those who agree with you to lend you their hashing power.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> when BTC runs out of things to mine a) why would miners that needed to process transactions even stick around hashing Bitcoin is designed with transaction fees for miners which in principle can replace block rewards as an incentive for hashing.

sebastos 9y ago

Everything about Bitcoin is driven by emergent consensus. This includes the mining - there is no underlying fundamental mathematical entity that is being discovered or exhausted when people are “mining”. The only reason there is said to be a limited number of Bitcoin available is, well... because everyone says so! All Bitcoin clients agree that it is correct and proper to award yourself 25BTC when you mine a block. Since we all agree that’s ok, we all happily build on top of blocks that do this. We ignore blocks that try to break the rules by awarding themselves more. Eventually we will all suddenly change our mind and only associate with blocks that award the miner 12.5BTC, and then 6.25, etc until it reaches zero. That is the total extent to which the supply of BTC is limited. It’s completely driven by that wide social consensus. If you tried to start a fork built off of older blocks with a bunch of your miner buddies, it would essentially be a 51% attack. You’d have to convince a quorum of miners and users to treat ledger entries in your fork like real Bitcoin transactions. If you have the power to do that, you have successfully attacked the network, and you may as well have just sat your new blocks with mining rewards on top of the extant main chain. It’s not like mining older blocks gives you more BTC in some mathematical sense - you’re always just earning whatever you think the network will let you get away with, based on the schedule that has been agreed upon a priori. Hopefully this makes it clear that the question of whether a fork has a separate supply is confused. Neither the main nor the fork have a true finite supply - just a finite amount people will in practice agree to letting you mine. In the case of the fork, it doesnt’t matter whether you can convince them to let you go back to increased mining reward, because you have a much larger problem - nobody considers any transaction in the fork money in the first place. If at any time they do, you’ve attacked the network. Miners and users both equally dislike a state of the world where there is more than 1 version of history - it calls into question whether any wealth they have in chain A is real now that chain B is more popular. In practice they will quickly coalesce into considering one chain the true one, and changing everybody’s mind, especially long after the transactions have settled, would be a monumental task. Because everybody understands this, nobody would even try it, since it’s a waste of precious mining resources. This is why you didn’t see rogue forks forming when the reward decreased from 50 to 25 BTC. I know that’s a wall of text, but feel free to keep asking questions if you’re interested.

geezerjay 9y ago
> Everything about Bitcoin is driven by emergent consensus. ...which is a fancy word for a speculative bubble.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  Actually, what he was doing was explaining the concept of how nodes enforce nakamoto consensus in order to validate transactions. It had absolutely zero to do with valuation.
- sebastos 9y ago
  Well, yes, just like the emergent consensus that US dollars are worth real goods and services. Nothing is “worth” something unless people say it is. There are plenty of problems with Bitcoin as a currency, but the fact that its value is derived from speculation is not one of them. All currency is like this.
freeone3000 9y ago
How does this square with, for instance, the Bitcoin Cash fork? Bitcoin Cash fulfills most of the "attack" as you've described, but it still trades as money.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  The social consensus, in this age of the world works in such a way that one of the few (but not sole) ways in which you can convince people to go along with your attack/fork is to put forward technical (including economic) arguments about why the rules should be done differently and ask those who agree with you to lend you their hashing power.