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yeah, well more specifically they could force a preferred fork to assume the "Bitcoin" ticker (BTC) by denying power to chinese miners on the disfavored fork. e

yeah, well more specifically they could force a preferred fork to assume the "Bitcoin" ticker (BTC) by denying power to chinese miners on the disfavored fork. exchanges and miners, rather than the developers, ultimately determine this, as there's no in-band way to control what ticker is used for trading what token.

gruez 6y ago
That was tried a few years ago with the segwit2x fork. A group of miners comprising 82% of the hashpower got together and agreed to activate the segwit2x fork. Despite having a overwhelming majority of the hashpower the fork was never happened due to lack of community consensus. https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consensus-2017-133521fe9a77 https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consen...
- ChainOfFools 6y ago
  the consensus vote to activate sw2x on existing BTC network was an in-band mechanism, and set to some super impossible threshold like 95 or 99% to activate a protocol change. this is a different situation, where an out of band entity can selectively shut off a significant fraction of hashpower, and unlike the weedy obscurity of an architectural spat between largely unknown (by the mainstream) such a move would (indeed, will) make major waves in mainstream Joe Pension Fund/ Number Go Up news, who will not be familiar with nor interested in the technical arguments for the fork that is being actively suppressed. there's no weeks-long debate window here. the stakes are very different now than in the Jihan boogeyman days, you can't handwave away this critical risk to stability or spin it as technical trivia of no concern to non-specialists.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >the consensus vote to activate sw2x on existing BTC network was an in-band mechanism, and set to some super impossible threshold like 95 or 99% to activate a fork. Source for this? I searched around and the target was 80%. https://www.weusecoins.com/what-is-segwit2x/ https://www.weusecoins.com/what-is-segwit2x/ > such a move would (indeed, will) make major waves in mainstream Joe Pension Fund/ Number Go Up news, who will not be familiar with nor interested in the technical arguments for the fork that is being actively suppressed. there's no weeks-long debate window here. Fair point, given how the markets reacted to this drop in hashrate.
    - ChainOfFools 6y ago
      > Their SegWit code, defined by BIP141, activates if 95 percent of hash power within a single difficulty period of about two weeks signals readiness before November 15th.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      > Fair point, given how the markets reacted to this drop in hashrate. What makes you think the market reacted to the drop in hash rate? A 20% move is pretty typical in crypto. IMO this is more likely due to Bitcoin not having moved in price in almost 2 months (it's below its 2/18 price now, by a lot). People moved their get-rich-quick energy over to Doge. And once that sputtered out, they tried to cash out. Tether by the way, had its two biggest outflow days ever on Thursday and Friday (200 and 300M respectively via the Kraken USDT:USD pair). If Tether is actually just backed by crypto and hope as we suspect, they'd have had to sell crypto to refill their depleted cash reserves. To be clear this is pure speculation. Another possibility is the market is reacting to all the Coinbase executives dumping massive quantities of equity on retail bag holders, signaling a potential top. Since all cryptos are dumping, primary and alt, it's probably a more systemic issue.
ArchD 6y ago
That's not how it works. In the event of a hard-fork, when the two forks adopt different rules about what blocks are valid, the actual users of BTC still decide which rules to follow. If a miner produces blocks that are invalid according to the rules that are adopted, the blocks that it produces are just disregarded. Thus, the hash rate competition between miners is only within each fork. If you are talking about denial-of-service by producing empty blocks or blocks that exclude certain addresses, that's another matter...

gruez 6y ago

That was tried a few years ago with the segwit2x fork. A group of miners comprising 82% of the hashpower got together and agreed to activate the segwit2x fork. Despite having a overwhelming majority of the hashpower the fork was never happened due to lack of community consensus. https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consensus-2017-133521fe9a77 https://dcgco.medium.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consen...

ChainOfFools 6y ago
the consensus vote to activate sw2x on existing BTC network was an in-band mechanism, and set to some super impossible threshold like 95 or 99% to activate a protocol change. this is a different situation, where an out of band entity can selectively shut off a significant fraction of hashpower, and unlike the weedy obscurity of an architectural spat between largely unknown (by the mainstream) such a move would (indeed, will) make major waves in mainstream Joe Pension Fund/ Number Go Up news, who will not be familiar with nor interested in the technical arguments for the fork that is being actively suppressed. there's no weeks-long debate window here. the stakes are very different now than in the Jihan boogeyman days, you can't handwave away this critical risk to stability or spin it as technical trivia of no concern to non-specialists.
- gruez 6y ago
  >the consensus vote to activate sw2x on existing BTC network was an in-band mechanism, and set to some super impossible threshold like 95 or 99% to activate a fork. Source for this? I searched around and the target was 80%. https://www.weusecoins.com/what-is-segwit2x/ https://www.weusecoins.com/what-is-segwit2x/ > such a move would (indeed, will) make major waves in mainstream Joe Pension Fund/ Number Go Up news, who will not be familiar with nor interested in the technical arguments for the fork that is being actively suppressed. there's no weeks-long debate window here. Fair point, given how the markets reacted to this drop in hashrate.
  - ChainOfFools 6y ago
    > Their SegWit code, defined by BIP141, activates if 95 percent of hash power within a single difficulty period of about two weeks signals readiness before November 15th.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > Fair point, given how the markets reacted to this drop in hashrate. What makes you think the market reacted to the drop in hash rate? A 20% move is pretty typical in crypto. IMO this is more likely due to Bitcoin not having moved in price in almost 2 months (it's below its 2/18 price now, by a lot). People moved their get-rich-quick energy over to Doge. And once that sputtered out, they tried to cash out. Tether by the way, had its two biggest outflow days ever on Thursday and Friday (200 and 300M respectively via the Kraken USDT:USD pair). If Tether is actually just backed by crypto and hope as we suspect, they'd have had to sell crypto to refill their depleted cash reserves. To be clear this is pure speculation. Another possibility is the market is reacting to all the Coinbase executives dumping massive quantities of equity on retail bag holders, signaling a potential top. Since all cryptos are dumping, primary and alt, it's probably a more systemic issue.

ArchD 6y ago

That's not how it works. In the event of a hard-fork, when the two forks adopt different rules about what blocks are valid, the actual users of BTC still decide which rules to follow. If a miner produces blocks that are invalid according to the rules that are adopted, the blocks that it produces are just disregarded. Thus, the hash rate competition between miners is only within each fork. If you are talking about denial-of-service by producing empty blocks or blocks that exclude certain addresses, that's another matter...