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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 th
by 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 agoIf 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 agoWe 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