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It would be easier even than that, observe what happened in 2017. Bitfinex said they would allocate the BTC ticker to the present BTC chain no matter what the h

It would be easier even than that, observe what happened in 2017. Bitfinex said they would allocate the BTC ticker to the present BTC chain no matter what the hash power indicated was the actual canonical chain and that was the end of it. Contrary to popular belief, miners aren't choosing anything when it comes to BTC. They're rubber stamping the decisions of the BTC core developers, who are blessed by the exchanges such as Bitfinex, and they are collecting fees on that rubber stamp.

JonathanBeuys 4y ago
That sounds like the right thing to do? Why would the hash power decide what is called BTC? If Dogecoin some day attracts more hashing power than Bitcoin, then Bitfinex is supposed to assign the BTC ticker to Dogecoin?
- etherael 4y ago
  We and a group of partners run a restaurant together. One day you decide to turn it into an apothecary for the dispensation of poisons, and keep the name and pretend that it's still a restaurant. Any mechanism which rubber stamps the above process as legitimate and collects a fee for doing so is corrupt, letalone over the objections of an enormous fragment of both customers and partners in the restaurant in question. Lack of objection or approval from those whom the change is in the interests of, or who are simply too ignorant to understand what is going on, don't change that. That is effectively what happened with BTC. The way that it was supposed to work would be that the hashpower would choose the canonical tip of the chain if there were two conflicting ideas about what the chain should actually be. BCH stuck to that ideal and through two contentious and many more peaceable forks proceeded according to it. BTC did not.
- jtc331 4y ago
  Hash power in the context of potential forks in the BTC chain, not a different coin.
  - ntoskrnl 4y ago
    You're both already explaining the reasoning through your wording, "present BTC chain" and "potential forks". If you fork a project, even if yours becomes more popular, that doesn't mean you get to take over the original name.
    - etherael 4y ago
      > If you fork a project, even if yours becomes more popular, that doesn't mean you get to take over the original name. That's exactly what happened with BTC. And yet almost everybody calls it Bitcoin.
      - ntoskrnl 4y ago
        BCH changed the blocksize and thus became incompatible with the original network. If you're claiming that the project that kept the blocksize the same and remained backwards compatible is the fork, then I'm done here and I wish you the best of luck.
        etherael 4y ago
        It was the original plan to change the blocksize all along. Satoshi said in 2009: "The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size." Some latecoming BTC core devs cancelled that plan, with zero justification, changed the consensus mechanism for the chain from hashpower to fiat declaration by fraudulent centralised exchange running a pump and dump scam with fake money, and sabotaged the entire project in the process into complete uselessness, and to this day we're stuck with people who believe a fundamental financial revolution is going to take place on a chain that was forced to 4tx/second and get very angry, confused or surprised when you point out that such a change is clear and obvious sabotage. If you're claiming otherwise, then I'm done here and I wish you the best of luck.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I think you're missing some context about (what is now called) Bitcoin Cash. Look up the debate between big blockers and small blockers if you're interested in learning more; a quick summary, many people wanted larger block size so bitcoin could process more transactions. I believe several newer core developers staged a coup to prevent this from happening, despite several of the longer-term contributors being in favour of it. The original contributors (sans satoshi, who was mostly inactive at this point), had their access to the git repositories revoked. This video goes into a bit more detail (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g) but basically the people opposing a larger blocksize had financial incentives.. a lot were in bed with a company called Blockstream which benefits from their development on sidechains (now the lightning network). Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a means of exchange (more transactions would be processed, and they would be cheaper). This is where Bitcoin Cash is now, but it doesn't get the BTC ticker symbol because Bitfinex and other CEXes have a lot of influence as well.
  - ntoskrnl 4y ago
    > Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a means of exchange (more transactions would be processed, and they would be cheaper). Of course the flipside of this is that it would become very expensive to run a node. Bitcoin's blockchain is ~400 GB after 13 years. BCH has a 32x larger blocksize cap, so we can extrapolate that if anyone actually used that fork, it would grow a 12 TB blockchain over that same period. As a result running a node would become expensive and the network would become much less decentralized (the very thing people are complaining about in this thread!)
    - etherael 4y ago
      This would be true if the number being 32x'd was actually high, but that is not true. It was 1 megabyte. 32 megabytes over ten minutes is not even 512kbps. Other chains that process much more throughput, as well as BCH itself, has been benchmarked on very modest hardware pushing that boundary and higher. Simple fact of the matter is that the whole justification for the permanent 1mb limit was an outright indefensible lie, pushed on idiots, and supported by censorship. Nothing more, and nothing less.
- barnbuilder 4y ago
  You're completely right. Hashpower between chains is only relevant if they are compatible (same consensus rules), as the accumulated proof of work is used as an indicator of which chain should be followed. Once a chain hard forks to alter the consensus rules like Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc, there is no amount of additional hashpower that would make up for the incompatibility -- a node will simply ignore the invalid blocks.

JonathanBeuys 4y ago

That sounds like the right thing to do? Why would the hash power decide what is called BTC? If Dogecoin some day attracts more hashing power than Bitcoin, then Bitfinex is supposed to assign the BTC ticker to Dogecoin?

etherael 4y ago
We and a group of partners run a restaurant together. One day you decide to turn it into an apothecary for the dispensation of poisons, and keep the name and pretend that it's still a restaurant. Any mechanism which rubber stamps the above process as legitimate and collects a fee for doing so is corrupt, letalone over the objections of an enormous fragment of both customers and partners in the restaurant in question. Lack of objection or approval from those whom the change is in the interests of, or who are simply too ignorant to understand what is going on, don't change that. That is effectively what happened with BTC. The way that it was supposed to work would be that the hashpower would choose the canonical tip of the chain if there were two conflicting ideas about what the chain should actually be. BCH stuck to that ideal and through two contentious and many more peaceable forks proceeded according to it. BTC did not.
jtc331 4y ago
Hash power in the context of potential forks in the BTC chain, not a different coin.
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  You're both already explaining the reasoning through your wording, "present BTC chain" and "potential forks". If you fork a project, even if yours becomes more popular, that doesn't mean you get to take over the original name.
  - etherael 4y ago
    > If you fork a project, even if yours becomes more popular, that doesn't mean you get to take over the original name. That's exactly what happened with BTC. And yet almost everybody calls it Bitcoin.
    - ntoskrnl 4y ago
      BCH changed the blocksize and thus became incompatible with the original network. If you're claiming that the project that kept the blocksize the same and remained backwards compatible is the fork, then I'm done here and I wish you the best of luck.
      - etherael 4y ago
        It was the original plan to change the blocksize all along. Satoshi said in 2009: "The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size." Some latecoming BTC core devs cancelled that plan, with zero justification, changed the consensus mechanism for the chain from hashpower to fiat declaration by fraudulent centralised exchange running a pump and dump scam with fake money, and sabotaged the entire project in the process into complete uselessness, and to this day we're stuck with people who believe a fundamental financial revolution is going to take place on a chain that was forced to 4tx/second and get very angry, confused or surprised when you point out that such a change is clear and obvious sabotage. If you're claiming otherwise, then I'm done here and I wish you the best of luck.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
I think you're missing some context about (what is now called) Bitcoin Cash. Look up the debate between big blockers and small blockers if you're interested in learning more; a quick summary, many people wanted larger block size so bitcoin could process more transactions. I believe several newer core developers staged a coup to prevent this from happening, despite several of the longer-term contributors being in favour of it. The original contributors (sans satoshi, who was mostly inactive at this point), had their access to the git repositories revoked. This video goes into a bit more detail (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g) but basically the people opposing a larger blocksize had financial incentives.. a lot were in bed with a company called Blockstream which benefits from their development on sidechains (now the lightning network). Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a means of exchange (more transactions would be processed, and they would be cheaper). This is where Bitcoin Cash is now, but it doesn't get the BTC ticker symbol because Bitfinex and other CEXes have a lot of influence as well.
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  > Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a means of exchange (more transactions would be processed, and they would be cheaper). Of course the flipside of this is that it would become very expensive to run a node. Bitcoin's blockchain is ~400 GB after 13 years. BCH has a 32x larger blocksize cap, so we can extrapolate that if anyone actually used that fork, it would grow a 12 TB blockchain over that same period. As a result running a node would become expensive and the network would become much less decentralized (the very thing people are complaining about in this thread!)
  - etherael 4y ago
    This would be true if the number being 32x'd was actually high, but that is not true. It was 1 megabyte. 32 megabytes over ten minutes is not even 512kbps. Other chains that process much more throughput, as well as BCH itself, has been benchmarked on very modest hardware pushing that boundary and higher. Simple fact of the matter is that the whole justification for the permanent 1mb limit was an outright indefensible lie, pushed on idiots, and supported by censorship. Nothing more, and nothing less.
barnbuilder 4y ago
You're completely right. Hashpower between chains is only relevant if they are compatible (same consensus rules), as the accumulated proof of work is used as an indicator of which chain should be followed. Once a chain hard forks to alter the consensus rules like Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc, there is no amount of additional hashpower that would make up for the incompatibility -- a node will simply ignore the invalid blocks.