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As Ethereum has shown the immutable part is up to developer whim. The “hard limit” is literally a config value.

gruez 6y ago
...assuming you can get consensus. That's harder than you think. On ethereum it might be easy because the creator is still around, but on bitcoin it's very hard. See the whole segwit2x controversy.
- bostonsre 6y ago
  Not too hard to get consensus if you're an authoritarian regime in china. All of the largest miners are in china. https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-mining-pools/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...
  - gruez 6y ago
    Segwit2x had the miners support, yet it still failed.
    - bostonsre 6y ago
      It sounded like they required support from the developer community but they didn't have it. Not sure if that support would be needed for a 51% attack, would it?
      - gruez 6y ago
        Depends on the attack you're pulling off. A 51% attack won't allow you to change the coin generation rate (what peteretep was talking about).
        peteretep 6y ago
        Uncle Sam wakes up tomorrow and says: "Compliance measures on crypto-currency are expensive. We'll be charging a 3% compliance tax on all crypto-currency holdings, and we'll do this via any US-registered crypto-brokers charging a withholding tax unless you can prove it's double-taxation; also any failure to pay this is tax evasion and will be prosecuted as such" you'll see some hard forks. Also this is a _great_ idea as it increases tax revenue, increases investment in US bonds and stocks, _and_ it suddenly swells the value of US Govt gold reserves.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  At least for Bitcoin, don't miners effectively control consensus? And they're less concerned with you using Bitcoin to store wealth and more concerned with recovering the cost of their single-purpose hardware. Your interests are actually less aligned with the people running than Bitcoin show than with central banks.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >At least for Bitcoin, don't miners effectively control consensus? They completely control consensus when it comes to transaction ordering, but for other network parameters like emission rate, they don't have any control. If they decided to bump block rewards by 2x none of the blocks would be accepted by exchanges or merchants, and it would effectively be a hard fork. Segwit2x had majority miner support but failed because it couldn't get enough community support.

...assuming you can get consensus. That's harder than you think. On ethereum it might be easy because the creator is still around, but on bitcoin it's very hard. See the whole segwit2x controversy.

bostonsre 6y ago
Not too hard to get consensus if you're an authoritarian regime in china. All of the largest miners are in china. https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-mining-pools/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...
- gruez 6y ago
  Segwit2x had the miners support, yet it still failed.
  - bostonsre 6y ago
    It sounded like they required support from the developer community but they didn't have it. Not sure if that support would be needed for a 51% attack, would it?
    - gruez 6y ago
      Depends on the attack you're pulling off. A 51% attack won't allow you to change the coin generation rate (what peteretep was talking about).
      - peteretep 6y ago
        Uncle Sam wakes up tomorrow and says: "Compliance measures on crypto-currency are expensive. We'll be charging a 3% compliance tax on all crypto-currency holdings, and we'll do this via any US-registered crypto-brokers charging a withholding tax unless you can prove it's double-taxation; also any failure to pay this is tax evasion and will be prosecuted as such" you'll see some hard forks. Also this is a _great_ idea as it increases tax revenue, increases investment in US bonds and stocks, _and_ it suddenly swells the value of US Govt gold reserves.
dehrmann 6y ago
At least for Bitcoin, don't miners effectively control consensus? And they're less concerned with you using Bitcoin to store wealth and more concerned with recovering the cost of their single-purpose hardware. Your interests are actually less aligned with the people running than Bitcoin show than with central banks.
- gruez 6y ago
  >At least for Bitcoin, don't miners effectively control consensus? They completely control consensus when it comes to transaction ordering, but for other network parameters like emission rate, they don't have any control. If they decided to bump block rewards by 2x none of the blocks would be accepted by exchanges or merchants, and it would effectively be a hard fork. Segwit2x had majority miner support but failed because it couldn't get enough community support.