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The author is correct, in a sense, that Bitcoin's core security is social consensus, but he falsely equivocates it with fiat currency. They are most definitely
by ursuscamp 4y ago
The author is correct, in a sense, that Bitcoin's core security is social consensus, but he falsely equivocates it with fiat currency. They are most definitely not governed by the same sets of incentives. The incentives of Bitcoin ensure its monetary policy won't change, and those incentives have strengthened consistently over time.
He oversells the need of miners to band together to defend Bitcoin. They do not. All that's needed is for nodes to invalidate blocks, which is a simple command. No code changes or anything required. If an attacker is 10 blocks deep into an attack, node operators can just invalidate the first block of the attack, wasting all of the effort and resources of the attacker. Nodes can invalidate blocks longer than an attacker can stay solvent.
Miners must follow the economic majority of the network or risk wasting resources mining a losing chain. Miners aren't rule makers, they're rule takers. This was the main lesson of the Bitcoin Cash fork which the author mentions several times, but maybe he missed the point of it.