6 ms·

> just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity So, the much-vaunted "mathematical guarantee" that only 21m BTC will ever be mined depend

by FabHK 5y ago

> just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity So, the much-vaunted "mathematical guarantee" that only 21m BTC will ever be mined depends on the benevolence of those 50 miners not to fiddle with the code base. Makes perfect sense to trust those honourable individuals more than the central bankers in control of fiat. /s

yourapostasy 5y ago
> ...the benevolence of those 50 miners... What mechanisms do those 50 miners have to coordinate amongst each other, starting with how do they identify each other, communicate with each other, then overcome Prisoner's Dilemma in negotiating with each other?
tinus_hn 5y ago
How are these miner going to fiddle with the code on your computer? That is not the issue caused by this concentration of mining power.
- CompuHacker 5y ago
  If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    No, if they start to play with different rules their mined blocks will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. That’s not what the issue is with concentrated mining power.
    - arcatek 5y ago
      If they start to play with different rules, one of the hard fork remaining branches (or both) will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. There's no telling whether it'd be the "hijacked" branch or the original one - assuming they control 50%+ of the mining power, there's a decent argument that the remaining miners would follow their lead if only to stay on the largest branch.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Developers of the core protocol would notice, add a flag and then miners/clients/exchanges who want to remain with the same dev team can signal they want to follow the "dev" chain instead of the "miner" chain. Usually forks have checkpoints as well so things can't change willy-nilly.
        jstanley 5y ago
        If blocks in the "miner" chain break the rules of the "dev" chain, then no flag is required. You'll automatically stick with the chain that contains valid blocks, as determined by the implementation that you're running.
        brighton36 5y ago
        Eventually the us government will decide what codebase is valid. And exchanges will immediately switch to that codebase. Probably that codebase will support kyc and whitelist/blacklist functions. Bitcoin is fiat. It doesn't have 79 protons in it's nucleus.
      - dannyw 5y ago
        What miners do is irrelevant: the code known as bitcoin, with a 21M hard cap, simply will reject any block that creates more than its allowed bitcoins as invalid, the same way it rejects a random string of bytes as invalid.
        danbruc 5y ago
        Depending on your definitions this might or might no be true but it also might be totally irrelevant. There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin. If everyone would run new implementations with a different coin cap, you can argue that it is no longer Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a very specific specification with a 21M coin cap, but this would have little bearing on the actual situation.
    - jornhub 5y ago
      If they have the majority mining power they could equally well undermine the security of the original branch, rendering it worthless as well. Miners have interests, core developers have interests, bitcoin users have all kinds of interests, none of them on their own decides what will happen. Without miners there is no bitcoin, but neither is there without developers or without users. Would you feel safe having your savings stored in the original bitcoin fork, knowing there is a mining cartel that holds 50% mining power? Some users will accept reasonable changes that weere lobbied for by the miners, if that means they get to enjoy the security provided by the miners.
    - analog31 5y ago
      Does this mean if enough people don't like you, they can cancel your money?
  - Melting_Harps 5y ago
    > If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now. This is less a criticism towards you @CompuHacker and more about how ill-informed reporters are (especially it's most vocal critics) about Bitcoin's history. We already went through this during the USAF/Segwit war that went on for far too long if you were there and delayed so many other key features that we are only now catching up to. With the added caveat that Roger Veer (a VERY ignorant whale with influencer status) and Jihan (CEO at the time of Bitmain with a monopoly on ASIC miners and large hashing power on the network) decided to hi-jack Bitcoin for their own ends. There were other whales/high net worth entities, including Coinbase, but lets keep it simple for arguments sake. In short, it didn't work and no one uses/used their fork (Bcash) because the end result was that Bitcoin's mainchain and it's features was valued far more than what whales and hashing power/devices. Furthermore, upon the fork people arbitraged the coin and dumped it in exchange for Bitcoin and Bcash has never recovered since. Showing that playing by the rules has it's incentives and is rewarded: rewarding consensus is one of Bitcoin's core features, and I wish more people would realize this is the ecosystem is far more conducive toward progress than abject discord. What's even more amusing is that a core developer of Bitcoin Core decided to help patch some of Bcash's source code, showing that what you fear has actually already played out and proved why Bitcoin has already proven itself and has a the battle scars to prove it. It's remarkable what has happened in this space in the last 12 years, and in my ideal World I think their would be more time spent on that and what it has taught us via empirical experimentation rather than just the price. Sidenote: It's why the plot of the 51% attack on the series Silicon Valley only made sense to people who really have no idea how the network attack would actually play out on decentralized networks.
Valakas_ 5y ago
No. Who holds the real power are nodes. Miners are just workers doing their job and getting paid for it.
worrycue 5y ago
Being able to print more would actually be a benefit as it allows for inflation. Central banks typically aim for 1-3% inflation to get people spending money and allowing the economy to function instead of just hoarding it.
- Siira 5y ago
  “Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time. Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.
    - ur-whale 5y ago
      That's assuming that BTC's aren't infinitely divisible. Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Therefore, it's unlikely that there will ever be zero bitcoins.
      - noch 5y ago
        > Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.
        5y ago
glenvdb 5y ago
You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network. The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewarded with the Bitcoin subsidy.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Well, Ethereum miners decide on changing the protocol like all the time.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    BTC != ETH. This is one of the arguments in BTC’s favor.
  - woah 5y ago
    Also wrong. For an Ethereum (or bitcoin) upgrade that requires a hard fork to be accepted as “being Ethereum”, all the users running Ethereum nodes need to be OK with it and update their full node software to that version.
- FabHK 5y ago
  So, let's play that out. Suppose 90% of miners (hash power) collude (as GP posited), for example validating blocks with a larger coinbase (mining reward). The "good" nodes don't accept these (but the "bad" miners can trivially have many nodes that do accept them). But now the "good" hash power drops to 10%, so only every 100 minutes a "good" block is mined (suppose this happened just after a difficulty adjustment), and that goes on for 20 weeks. In the meantime, the bad nodes and miners carry on as before, pretty much, but with their malicious change incorporated. If they're bored, they can devote some of their hash power to double spend attack the "good" chain. Which chain will come out on top? Sure, it's unlikely. But not impossible. Just as runaway inflation in a reasonably managed fiat currency is not impossible. Just unlikely. (And, yes, hyper inflation has happened historically. Similarly, rewriting of the immutable Ethereum chain and BTC forks have happened historically.)
tekproxy 5y ago
Have fun staying poor.

by FabHK 5y ago

yourapostasy 5y ago

> ...the benevolence of those 50 miners... What mechanisms do those 50 miners have to coordinate amongst each other, starting with how do they identify each other, communicate with each other, then overcome Prisoner's Dilemma in negotiating with each other?

tinus_hn 5y ago

How are these miner going to fiddle with the code on your computer? That is not the issue caused by this concentration of mining power.

CompuHacker 5y ago
If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  No, if they start to play with different rules their mined blocks will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. That’s not what the issue is with concentrated mining power.
  - arcatek 5y ago
    If they start to play with different rules, one of the hard fork remaining branches (or both) will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. There's no telling whether it'd be the "hijacked" branch or the original one - assuming they control 50%+ of the mining power, there's a decent argument that the remaining miners would follow their lead if only to stay on the largest branch.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Developers of the core protocol would notice, add a flag and then miners/clients/exchanges who want to remain with the same dev team can signal they want to follow the "dev" chain instead of the "miner" chain. Usually forks have checkpoints as well so things can't change willy-nilly.
      - jstanley 5y ago
        If blocks in the "miner" chain break the rules of the "dev" chain, then no flag is required. You'll automatically stick with the chain that contains valid blocks, as determined by the implementation that you're running.
        brighton36 5y ago
        Eventually the us government will decide what codebase is valid. And exchanges will immediately switch to that codebase. Probably that codebase will support kyc and whitelist/blacklist functions. Bitcoin is fiat. It doesn't have 79 protons in it's nucleus.
    - dannyw 5y ago
      What miners do is irrelevant: the code known as bitcoin, with a 21M hard cap, simply will reject any block that creates more than its allowed bitcoins as invalid, the same way it rejects a random string of bytes as invalid.
      - danbruc 5y ago
        Depending on your definitions this might or might no be true but it also might be totally irrelevant. There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin. If everyone would run new implementations with a different coin cap, you can argue that it is no longer Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a very specific specification with a 21M coin cap, but this would have little bearing on the actual situation.
  - jornhub 5y ago
    If they have the majority mining power they could equally well undermine the security of the original branch, rendering it worthless as well. Miners have interests, core developers have interests, bitcoin users have all kinds of interests, none of them on their own decides what will happen. Without miners there is no bitcoin, but neither is there without developers or without users. Would you feel safe having your savings stored in the original bitcoin fork, knowing there is a mining cartel that holds 50% mining power? Some users will accept reasonable changes that weere lobbied for by the miners, if that means they get to enjoy the security provided by the miners.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Does this mean if enough people don't like you, they can cancel your money?
- Melting_Harps 5y ago
  > If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now. This is less a criticism towards you @CompuHacker and more about how ill-informed reporters are (especially it's most vocal critics) about Bitcoin's history. We already went through this during the USAF/Segwit war that went on for far too long if you were there and delayed so many other key features that we are only now catching up to. With the added caveat that Roger Veer (a VERY ignorant whale with influencer status) and Jihan (CEO at the time of Bitmain with a monopoly on ASIC miners and large hashing power on the network) decided to hi-jack Bitcoin for their own ends. There were other whales/high net worth entities, including Coinbase, but lets keep it simple for arguments sake. In short, it didn't work and no one uses/used their fork (Bcash) because the end result was that Bitcoin's mainchain and it's features was valued far more than what whales and hashing power/devices. Furthermore, upon the fork people arbitraged the coin and dumped it in exchange for Bitcoin and Bcash has never recovered since. Showing that playing by the rules has it's incentives and is rewarded: rewarding consensus is one of Bitcoin's core features, and I wish more people would realize this is the ecosystem is far more conducive toward progress than abject discord. What's even more amusing is that a core developer of Bitcoin Core decided to help patch some of Bcash's source code, showing that what you fear has actually already played out and proved why Bitcoin has already proven itself and has a the battle scars to prove it. It's remarkable what has happened in this space in the last 12 years, and in my ideal World I think their would be more time spent on that and what it has taught us via empirical experimentation rather than just the price. Sidenote: It's why the plot of the 51% attack on the series Silicon Valley only made sense to people who really have no idea how the network attack would actually play out on decentralized networks.

Valakas_ 5y ago

No. Who holds the real power are nodes. Miners are just workers doing their job and getting paid for it.

worrycue 5y ago

Being able to print more would actually be a benefit as it allows for inflation. Central banks typically aim for 1-3% inflation to get people spending money and allowing the economy to function instead of just hoarding it.

Siira 5y ago
“Hoarding” money, also known as saving in esoteric circles.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time. Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    That's assuming that BTC's aren't infinitely divisible. Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Therefore, it's unlikely that there will ever be zero bitcoins.
    - noch 5y ago
      > Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained. Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.
      - 5y ago

glenvdb 5y ago

You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network. The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewarded with the Bitcoin subsidy.

H8crilA 5y ago
Well, Ethereum miners decide on changing the protocol like all the time.
- christophilus 5y ago
  BTC != ETH. This is one of the arguments in BTC’s favor.
- woah 5y ago
  Also wrong. For an Ethereum (or bitcoin) upgrade that requires a hard fork to be accepted as “being Ethereum”, all the users running Ethereum nodes need to be OK with it and update their full node software to that version.
FabHK 5y ago
So, let's play that out. Suppose 90% of miners (hash power) collude (as GP posited), for example validating blocks with a larger coinbase (mining reward). The "good" nodes don't accept these (but the "bad" miners can trivially have many nodes that do accept them). But now the "good" hash power drops to 10%, so only every 100 minutes a "good" block is mined (suppose this happened just after a difficulty adjustment), and that goes on for 20 weeks. In the meantime, the bad nodes and miners carry on as before, pretty much, but with their malicious change incorporated. If they're bored, they can devote some of their hash power to double spend attack the "good" chain. Which chain will come out on top? Sure, it's unlikely. But not impossible. Just as runaway inflation in a reasonably managed fiat currency is not impossible. Just unlikely. (And, yes, hyper inflation has happened historically. Similarly, rewriting of the immutable Ethereum chain and BTC forks have happened historically.)

tekproxy 5y ago

Have fun staying poor.