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Miners have no ability to retract or redirect transactions. And to exclude them would require 100% collusion. Miners as "middlemen" doesn't make sense. Edit: Y

• xapata 6y ago
  > collusion It doesn't take 100% collusion, but certainly no more than 51%, and I've read speculation (though no proof) that less is sufficient. > middlemen A mining cartel can't edit a blockchain, but they can choose to accept a different blockchain, which is effectively the same thing. Do you accept the premise that a sufficiently large cartel can exist, by state intervention in the price of electricity? [Apologies for the edits. I often find I dislike my first draft.]
  • beaner 6y ago
    It requires 100% because it only takes one miner to include the transaction for it to eventually be included. Chain splits do not "edit" blockchains, they still require their own proof of work, and they cannot modify transactions, only drop them. Honest participants in a chain that is orphaned will not have had their money spent in the new chain, leaving it available to spend again. That's all that can be done. It requires a lot of work to be done once, let alone maintained over time on consecutive blocks, and in extremely short order the rewards sacrificed by fucking with the blockchain make continued attacks expensive to the degree that they'd be practically impossible. People aren't thinking this through. The "race to the bottom" endgame is not that miners consolidate in one state with subsidized electricity, but that mining operations eventually power themselves off-grid through renewables, making distribution entirely detached from geography and jurisdiction.
    • xapata 6y ago
      > continued attacks ... practically impossible I agree that continued attacks makes a complicated situation, given the cartel participants would probably hold a significant amount of coin and would risk devaluing themselves against some other currency (though in the end-game scenario, what other currency matters?). Let's imagine that the majority of domestic and international trade is conducted in Bitcoin, with maybe some alterations to the protocol to enable hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at essentially zero cost from the perspective of an individual actor (non-miner), even bursting up to tens of millions of transactions per second, somehow. Suppose then that two large governments, say the Unites States of America and the People's Republic of China, get into a little tiff about some boats hanging around the Taiwan Strait. Would these societies (in aggregate) prefer that their domestic and international trade be conducted in Bitcoin, or in a domestically-controlled currency? A cartel could lock out a set of accounts from the Bitcoin network. Perhaps only temporarily, but long enough to have serious effects. > power themselves off-grid through renewables That'd be cool, but I doubt that off-grid will ever reach the efficiency and scale that on-grid will provide, due to fluctuations in the power sources and the economies of scale. It's hard to make a currency choice by betting on that technology, especially as the calculation could swap as the technology changes.