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Sure, but it is very easy for the miners to also run full nodes and validate whatever they want - much easier than it is for someone running a full node to also

Sure, but it is very easy for the miners to also run full nodes and validate whatever they want - much easier than it is for someone running a full node to also mine (at any realistic hash rate). So miners can more or less trivially flood the network with full nodes that validate their preferred chains. > This is why there was such a vicious fight about block size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node remains feasible forever. This is a tangent, but I wonder how this squares with the people claiming that Bitcoin's (terrible, horrible, no good, very bad) transaction rate is not limited by design, just by some temporary politics.

samatman 4y ago
What you're describing is a fork, clearly. The assertion that miners can unilaterally fork and get away with it hasn't been backed up in practice. The creation of a whole bunch of brand-new full nodes which do something besides validate Bitcoin is the creation of something other than Bitcoin. Happens with reasonable frequency, just not the way you've described it.
- simiones 4y ago
  Right now the Bitcoin network consists of ~59,000 nodes (according to the article), running various versions of the Bitcoin software, implementing the same protocol. If the biggest mining pools were to launch ~100,000 nodes of their own, initially running the exact same software as the other 59k nodes (until they get some reputation) and then modifying the software to allow larger blocks, that they would start sending to the network as well, what would prevent them from effectively changing what Bitcoin is, leaving the current nodes as a legacy fork? Especially if they were doing this together with the Bitcoin devs? Edit: more realistically, there are far fewer popular nodes, so the miners would have to create a much smaller number of nodes to achieve this effect.
  - samatman 4y ago
    What you would then have is 100,000 nodes running one piece of software, and 59k which are doing exactly what they were doing, and in your scenario, the 100k chain also has a higher hash rate. What happens next is a social phenomenon. No one knows. But which chain is original is perfectly clear: it's the the 59k chain, which will still be mining blocks, and it all comes down to who wants to use which one more. But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining.
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      > But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining. Define "force". Because to me - if you are on a chain that has no future (as in the fork has more resources, better hash rate, better social support) then while you can continue to use the original, the odds that it holds any value is basically zero. Same is true in the inverse - creating a fork and then expecting to be able to move any significant value off the original chain, when the original chain holds better social support and more resources, is usually folly. Take bitcoin cash - which is a great example of this. They split in 2017 and began trading at ~240 USD to bitcoins ~2700 USD. So they started with the assumption that their fork had roughly 1/10 of the value of bitcoin. Today they trade at 119 USD, to bitcoins 21170 USD (and this is after the HUGE drop over the last month): Roughly 1/200th the price. Further - I strongly suspect that the reason BCH is still worth anything at all is that we're well into a crypto bubble - there are FAR too many completely worthless coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values. The fact that a usable chain forked from BTC for genuine technical reasons (and a social disagreement over segwit) drops so much value is a BAD sign for that group of original folks on the 59k chain. They can certainly keep mining away on that chain, and if the goal is to still facilitate exchange only in that original chain, they're fine. The second they need to get off that chain and on to something else (whether it's another coin or USD) then they're probably fucked - their chain won't have held value, because value is a social construct, not a number on a chain.
      - 4y ago
olalonde 4y ago
You are misunderstanding the meaning and purpose of running a full node. Coinbase[0] runs a full node to validate transactions. If miners start mining blocks that Coinbase considers invalid, Coinbase will reject the transactions. The number of full nodes on the network is more or less irrelevant, what matters is your own node. [0] You can replace Coinbase here with pretty much any Bitcoin participant, including individual users.
- simiones 4y ago
  If the largest miners switch to emitting larger blocks, and Coinbase starts receiving almost exclusively invalid nodes, what will they do next? What if Binance starts accepting these blocks, and now users have some BTC balance on Binance, and another on Coinbase?
  - olalonde 4y ago
    We don't have to speculate, it has happened multiple times already[0]. What happens is the hard forks are either ignored or they are supported but under a different name to avoid confusion (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, etc.). The only way I could imagine a hard fork succeeding (e.g. retain the "Bitcoin" name) is if it if it had an overwhelming community consensus, not only from miners but also from users (like Coinbase). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks

samatman 4y ago

What you're describing is a fork, clearly. The assertion that miners can unilaterally fork and get away with it hasn't been backed up in practice. The creation of a whole bunch of brand-new full nodes which do something besides validate Bitcoin is the creation of something other than Bitcoin. Happens with reasonable frequency, just not the way you've described it.

simiones 4y ago
Right now the Bitcoin network consists of ~59,000 nodes (according to the article), running various versions of the Bitcoin software, implementing the same protocol. If the biggest mining pools were to launch ~100,000 nodes of their own, initially running the exact same software as the other 59k nodes (until they get some reputation) and then modifying the software to allow larger blocks, that they would start sending to the network as well, what would prevent them from effectively changing what Bitcoin is, leaving the current nodes as a legacy fork? Especially if they were doing this together with the Bitcoin devs? Edit: more realistically, there are far fewer popular nodes, so the miners would have to create a much smaller number of nodes to achieve this effect.
- samatman 4y ago
  What you would then have is 100,000 nodes running one piece of software, and 59k which are doing exactly what they were doing, and in your scenario, the 100k chain also has a higher hash rate. What happens next is a social phenomenon. No one knows. But which chain is original is perfectly clear: it's the the 59k chain, which will still be mining blocks, and it all comes down to who wants to use which one more. But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    > But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining. Define "force". Because to me - if you are on a chain that has no future (as in the fork has more resources, better hash rate, better social support) then while you can continue to use the original, the odds that it holds any value is basically zero. Same is true in the inverse - creating a fork and then expecting to be able to move any significant value off the original chain, when the original chain holds better social support and more resources, is usually folly. Take bitcoin cash - which is a great example of this. They split in 2017 and began trading at ~240 USD to bitcoins ~2700 USD. So they started with the assumption that their fork had roughly 1/10 of the value of bitcoin. Today they trade at 119 USD, to bitcoins 21170 USD (and this is after the HUGE drop over the last month): Roughly 1/200th the price. Further - I strongly suspect that the reason BCH is still worth anything at all is that we're well into a crypto bubble - there are FAR too many completely worthless coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values. The fact that a usable chain forked from BTC for genuine technical reasons (and a social disagreement over segwit) drops so much value is a BAD sign for that group of original folks on the 59k chain. They can certainly keep mining away on that chain, and if the goal is to still facilitate exchange only in that original chain, they're fine. The second they need to get off that chain and on to something else (whether it's another coin or USD) then they're probably fucked - their chain won't have held value, because value is a social construct, not a number on a chain.
    - 4y ago

olalonde 4y ago

You are misunderstanding the meaning and purpose of running a full node. Coinbase[0] runs a full node to validate transactions. If miners start mining blocks that Coinbase considers invalid, Coinbase will reject the transactions. The number of full nodes on the network is more or less irrelevant, what matters is your own node. [0] You can replace Coinbase here with pretty much any Bitcoin participant, including individual users.

simiones 4y ago
If the largest miners switch to emitting larger blocks, and Coinbase starts receiving almost exclusively invalid nodes, what will they do next? What if Binance starts accepting these blocks, and now users have some BTC balance on Binance, and another on Coinbase?
- olalonde 4y ago
  We don't have to speculate, it has happened multiple times already[0]. What happens is the hard forks are either ignored or they are supported but under a different name to avoid confusion (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, etc.). The only way I could imagine a hard fork succeeding (e.g. retain the "Bitcoin" name) is if it if it had an overwhelming community consensus, not only from miners but also from users (like Coinbase). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks