5 ms·

I consider Bitcoin decentralized; what makes you consider it a facade?

Yizahi 4y ago
Number of tokens in the individual holdings - power to crash the market immediately or clog the transactions for months starting a DOS attack on the network. Number of mining pools - power to hard fork the network, or to attack the network (51% attack is a very real possibility, the only reason it doesn't happen is the lack of general adoption - there are too few places to actually double spend tokens). Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc. And before you say "but but the banks are also bad!", sure they are often crooks, but proposing to replace them with even worse system, and even less accountable people is weird.
- copirate 4y ago
  > Number of mining pools - power to hard fork the network Miners can hard fork but if the economical agents (exchanges, users) don't follow that won't get them anywhere. Their fork will just become an alternative coin and they won't be able to sell their mined coins, or at a lower price. It happened in 2017 with Bitcoin Cash. > Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc. Same here: if the economical actors don't follow these people would just create a new altcoin. And these economical actors seem much more decentralized than the people you mention.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > Miners can hard fork but if the economical agents (exchanges, users) don't follow that won't get them anywhere. Their fork will just become an alternative coin and they won't be able to sell their mined coins, or at a lower price. How would users and exchanges find out about the alternate chain? Because from what I know the longest chain in existence is the valid chain, unless you are suggesting we trust centralized third parties like Vitalik and the Ethereum foundation to tell us which chain to mine on.
    - copirate 4y ago
      If the miners hard fork that means they create blocks that are invalid according to the previous rules. So exchanges and users with a node will just reject blocks from these miners, unless they also change the rules enforced by their own node. They will naturally follow the non-forked chain. They will be stuck there if all the miners apply the hard fork rules, but it requires only a few miners to keep the old chain alive. The agents decide which chain to follow be choosing what rules their node applies. They have to actively change their client software to follow a hard fork. Of course users who don't run their own node and rely only on exchanges depend on the decision made by their exchange. But in a controversial fork most exchanges would probably not pick side and handle both chains as two different coins. They would still have to somewhat pick a side by choosing the name of the coins though. What's also interesting is that anyone owning coins before the fork will have the same amount of coins on both chains. That happened in 2017 and the price almost instantaneously split to about 90 % of the previous value to the previous chain, and 10 % to the new chain. Users rejecting the fork could just sell their Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin and return to their initial value in Bitcoin.
DSingularity 4y ago
For me it’s the fact that mining is centralized. Censorship resistant? Good luck if pools collude to stop you from spending. Code is law? Good luck if they decide to amend the protocol and fork the blockchain. Take as a simple example of making mining more democratic — ie we can all mining on our CPUs without being completely dwarfed by those who imported Chinese hardware. That’s an easy change to the protocol. Do you think that the current pools will vote for that? The whole thing is a facade.

Number of tokens in the individual holdings - power to crash the market immediately or clog the transactions for months starting a DOS attack on the network. Number of mining pools - power to hard fork the network, or to attack the network (51% attack is a very real possibility, the only reason it doesn't happen is the lack of general adoption - there are too few places to actually double spend tokens). Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc. And before you say "but but the banks are also bad!", sure they are often crooks, but proposing to replace them with even worse system, and even less accountable people is weird.

copirate 4y ago
> Number of mining pools - power to hard fork the network Miners can hard fork but if the economical agents (exchanges, users) don't follow that won't get them anywhere. Their fork will just become an alternative coin and they won't be able to sell their mined coins, or at a lower price. It happened in 2017 with Bitcoin Cash. > Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc. Same here: if the economical actors don't follow these people would just create a new altcoin. And these economical actors seem much more decentralized than the people you mention.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > Miners can hard fork but if the economical agents (exchanges, users) don't follow that won't get them anywhere. Their fork will just become an alternative coin and they won't be able to sell their mined coins, or at a lower price. How would users and exchanges find out about the alternate chain? Because from what I know the longest chain in existence is the valid chain, unless you are suggesting we trust centralized third parties like Vitalik and the Ethereum foundation to tell us which chain to mine on.
  - copirate 4y ago
    If the miners hard fork that means they create blocks that are invalid according to the previous rules. So exchanges and users with a node will just reject blocks from these miners, unless they also change the rules enforced by their own node. They will naturally follow the non-forked chain. They will be stuck there if all the miners apply the hard fork rules, but it requires only a few miners to keep the old chain alive. The agents decide which chain to follow be choosing what rules their node applies. They have to actively change their client software to follow a hard fork. Of course users who don't run their own node and rely only on exchanges depend on the decision made by their exchange. But in a controversial fork most exchanges would probably not pick side and handle both chains as two different coins. They would still have to somewhat pick a side by choosing the name of the coins though. What's also interesting is that anyone owning coins before the fork will have the same amount of coins on both chains. That happened in 2017 and the price almost instantaneously split to about 90 % of the previous value to the previous chain, and 10 % to the new chain. Users rejecting the fork could just sell their Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin and return to their initial value in Bitcoin.

DSingularity 4y ago

For me it’s the fact that mining is centralized. Censorship resistant? Good luck if pools collude to stop you from spending. Code is law? Good luck if they decide to amend the protocol and fork the blockchain. Take as a simple example of making mining more democratic — ie we can all mining on our CPUs without being completely dwarfed by those who imported Chinese hardware. That’s an easy change to the protocol. Do you think that the current pools will vote for that? The whole thing is a facade.