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Umm... given that it is a consensus protocol.... how do you enforce a hardfork against someone with 51% of the hashrate? Couldn't they just run more servers?

• eric_bullington 12y ago
  It's likely possible now, because GHash doesn't actually own 51% of the hashrate. They own ~15% and the rest comes from their pool, and since this fork would strongly disincentivize pools, they'd likely not have the means to control the protocol.
• gizmo686 12y ago
  There is nothing to enforce about a hardfork. This proposal will produce a mutually incompatible protocal, so unpatched clients would reject it as invalid, and patched clients would reject the unpatched clients as invalid. This is in contrast to the accidental fork we saw last year (or was it longer?), where the new client would accept as valid the old clients chain. Practically, this could be implemented as blocks after block X must follow the new rule, blocks X and earlier must follow the old rule. Where X is sufficiently far in the future to allow for people to update.
• emin-gun-sirer 12y ago
  Co-author here. There is a common misconception that consensus of the Bitcoin community is correlated with the hashing power of the miners. A miner can have 51% of the hashing power, but if the blocks he produces are not accepted by clients (i.e. people with wallets, merchants, and the like), his 51% hash power is completely useless. His blocks need to be recognized by the clients, and if the clients decide that they do not want centralized mining pools, and decide that they only accept blocks with a second cryptopuzzle in them, miners who fail to switch will produce blocks that are unrecognized and therefore useless.
  • fleitz 12y ago
    So what would happen if 50% of clients switched and 50% didn't? Would you get effectively two kinds of BTC? (aka. a network partition?)