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Why would the miners agree to adding the "difficulty bomb" which is against their incentives? It's more likely they didn't have a say in it.
by amasad 8y ago
Why would the miners agree to adding the "difficulty bomb" which is against their incentives? It's more likely they didn't have a say in it.
- nostrademons 8y agoBecause otherwise they end up mining the chain that nobody's using. You can own a lot of ETC and it doesn't do you much good if you can't sell them because nobody's interested in using or trading them.
- amasad 8y agoHowever in Bitcoin the opposite happened -- the classic chain is the most valuable one despite being the least "scalable" or whatever pet feature the forks has. Also despite all the bitcoin celebrities being for the fork. That's behaving more like a decentralized technology that no single entity controls.
- darawk 8y agoWhat's happening is people are voting with their feet. Anyone can make any fork they like, and then everyone on the network can choose which one they prefer to use. That is what decentralization means. And both Ethereum and Bitcoin have that property.
- iSnow 8y agoA lot of BTC celebs didn't follow BCH at all. And essentially, L2 scaling as well as SegWit was shoved down our throats by the BTC Core devs. I don't see how that was very decentralized. OTOH, I am not strongly against it, as decentralization doesn't mean every single aspect has to be free of centralized decision making (starting with the name, logo or the code). In the end, users decide if they want to use it or not.
- chowells 8y agoIf the miners ever have a serious disagreement with the core developers, they can always remove the difficulty bomb in a fork. The purpose of the difficulty bomb is to force some update, not to force the core developers' preferred update.
- make3 8y agothe idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project
- ascendantlogic 8y agoYes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoThanks, I feel like I’m the crazy one when people talk about “just fork it” in response to the fact that developers of any specific coin could crash it at any point. That’s not how it works in reality. Bitcoin could be entirely ruined by a couple dozen people around the world in different ways at any time. Eth and other coins even more so. The idea of who “gets trusted” in these coins is just nuts. I’m not anti-coin... but man, I’m feel like I’m far enough from it to see a reality that many want to ignore.
- iSnow 8y agoI think your misunderstanding is believing users are locked into a crypto system if its implementation is controlled by a small group. They are not - if the developers abuse their power, users are free to migrate elsewhere and take their funds with them (in fiat value or as a different coin). That's different to e.g. PayPal where your funds can be locked and there's nothing you can do. Decentralized control over name, logo, features or code of a crypto coin is extremely hard to impossible, if only because there aren't too many people alive that can discuss core crypto features with any meaningful knowledge (I know I can't). Some coins do have governance features, but none of those have profited very much from that.
- dahdum 8y agoThe miners aren’t looked at the same way in Ethereum because you don’t have the large concentration of mining to a handful of companies like Bitcoin. Also because from the very first whitepaper it’s been known Ethereum would move to PoS.