3 ms·

I don't think the miners have as much say as you think. If the users all get together and hard fork the protocol, either the miners go along with it, or their b

I don't think the miners have as much say as you think. If the users all get together and hard fork the protocol, either the miners go along with it, or their blocks will be rejected, no matter how much hashing power they have. The only thing they could reasonably do is go rogue and try to 51% attack the new fork. If they did that successfully, however, they'd be showing that bitcoin isn't as strong as people think it is, thereby destroying their own business (it really is practically being mined by only 5 to 10 miners nowadays). This is why I like alternative coins like Peercoin and Neucoin which are trying to iron out the details of proof-of-stake. Even Ethereum is supposedly going to move to a proof-of-stake model.

ars 11y ago
The miners are the ones creating blocks. Users (i.e. transaction senders) simply have to accept it. They have no input into making or verifying blocks.
- jnbiche 11y ago
  This is not true. People who run full nodes (as a group) have just as much power as miners. If they all run a hard-forked client, then the miners will be happily mining away on their (worthless) chain.
  - ars 11y ago
    That just isn't true. The miners are the one that decide which chain is "real" and which isn't. The frontend has code to verify the decision of the miner, and it has no ability to change anything.
    - reddytowns 11y ago
      >The frontend has code to verify the decision of the miner, and it has no ability to change anything. But, if all the users agree to use frontend code that rejects the decision of the miners that refuse to play along, then the chain the miners are working on is effectively dead.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        The miners are users, so all users won't agree to anything adverse to that set of miners.
      - reddytowns 11y ago
        >The miners are users, so all users won't agree to anything adverse to that set of miners. The miners aren't trading any goods or services for their bitcoin. If merchants and other major players in the bitcoin ecomony go along with the hard fork, the previous chain is dead.
    - s_baby 11y ago
      How are the miners going to get users to switch over to their frontend? How are miners going to get companies like bitpay and coinbase to switch to their fork? It's up to the users to decide the value of the coins in each fork.
- reddytowns 11y ago
  It's irrelevant as to how many miners are working on the original chain. Mining could be done on a single laptop by one person for all the protocol cares. Lets say that 99.9% percentage of the miners decided not to go along with a hard fork, and 0.1% did, effectively bitcoin would be split up into 2 networks, A and B. Functionally, they would be nearly equivalent, ignoring network lag. As a user you could even have two clients, one that accepts transactions for network A, and one for network B. And your wallet in network A could even have a different balance than in network B. So how do you decide which wallet is correct? The same way everyone else does, by mass consensus, ie. by what everyone else is using. Ex, if you wanted to buy stuff from merchant X, and they had a network B wallet, it wouldn't matter how many miners were mining on network A, would it? Miners only provide security against a double spend 51% attack and that's it. By their very nature, they also are in the best position to do a 51% attack. Therefore the only leverage they have is they could threaten the new network. But as I was explaining before, if they attack network B, it goes to show that network A is nearly as vulnerable as network B is. In other words, its as centralized as fiat, which destroys one of the most highly touted features of Bitcoin as a currency of the people. If a couple of a bad actors (ie the people running the mining warehouses), can destroy it, either because of government coercion or by their own free will, then as you can see, Bitcoin is like the emperor who has no clothes. It could be destroyed at any time. So, we have a MAD situation (Mutually Assured Destruction). If the users force the miners hand too much, the miners could retaliate, by destroying bitcoin by executing a 51% attack. But of course, as long as the miners are making money, they don't want to do that. Nobody invested in the bitcoin wants anyone to know this, the users nor the miners, because it goes against their best interest to show the weakness of the currency they own. However, the longer this draws on, the more people will wake up and see that Bitcoin is truly becoming centralized into something that resembled Beenz and Floodz from the 90's. Not a currency operated by the people, but a currency owned and operated by a few large corporations.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    Miners with 51% could make only 1MB blocks and orphan all larger ones. Your reasoning is only valid in cases where blocks from one fork aren't accepted on the other, but this isn't true for blocksize.
ikeboy 11y ago
The miners can refuse to make 20MB blocks. Unless the hard fork makes 1MB blocks invalid, which isn't being suggested. With less than 50% of miners, you can't force much of a backwards-compatible hard fork like this one. I had a discussion about this recently here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38xfw3/forking_dont_the_payment_processors_and_exchanges/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38xfw3/forking_don...

ars 11y ago

The miners are the ones creating blocks. Users (i.e. transaction senders) simply have to accept it. They have no input into making or verifying blocks.

jnbiche 11y ago
This is not true. People who run full nodes (as a group) have just as much power as miners. If they all run a hard-forked client, then the miners will be happily mining away on their (worthless) chain.
- ars 11y ago
  That just isn't true. The miners are the one that decide which chain is "real" and which isn't. The frontend has code to verify the decision of the miner, and it has no ability to change anything.
  - reddytowns 11y ago
    >The frontend has code to verify the decision of the miner, and it has no ability to change anything. But, if all the users agree to use frontend code that rejects the decision of the miners that refuse to play along, then the chain the miners are working on is effectively dead.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      The miners are users, so all users won't agree to anything adverse to that set of miners.
    - reddytowns 11y ago
      >The miners are users, so all users won't agree to anything adverse to that set of miners. The miners aren't trading any goods or services for their bitcoin. If merchants and other major players in the bitcoin ecomony go along with the hard fork, the previous chain is dead.
  - s_baby 11y ago
    How are the miners going to get users to switch over to their frontend? How are miners going to get companies like bitpay and coinbase to switch to their fork? It's up to the users to decide the value of the coins in each fork.
reddytowns 11y ago
It's irrelevant as to how many miners are working on the original chain. Mining could be done on a single laptop by one person for all the protocol cares. Lets say that 99.9% percentage of the miners decided not to go along with a hard fork, and 0.1% did, effectively bitcoin would be split up into 2 networks, A and B. Functionally, they would be nearly equivalent, ignoring network lag. As a user you could even have two clients, one that accepts transactions for network A, and one for network B. And your wallet in network A could even have a different balance than in network B. So how do you decide which wallet is correct? The same way everyone else does, by mass consensus, ie. by what everyone else is using. Ex, if you wanted to buy stuff from merchant X, and they had a network B wallet, it wouldn't matter how many miners were mining on network A, would it? Miners only provide security against a double spend 51% attack and that's it. By their very nature, they also are in the best position to do a 51% attack. Therefore the only leverage they have is they could threaten the new network. But as I was explaining before, if they attack network B, it goes to show that network A is nearly as vulnerable as network B is. In other words, its as centralized as fiat, which destroys one of the most highly touted features of Bitcoin as a currency of the people. If a couple of a bad actors (ie the people running the mining warehouses), can destroy it, either because of government coercion or by their own free will, then as you can see, Bitcoin is like the emperor who has no clothes. It could be destroyed at any time. So, we have a MAD situation (Mutually Assured Destruction). If the users force the miners hand too much, the miners could retaliate, by destroying bitcoin by executing a 51% attack. But of course, as long as the miners are making money, they don't want to do that. Nobody invested in the bitcoin wants anyone to know this, the users nor the miners, because it goes against their best interest to show the weakness of the currency they own. However, the longer this draws on, the more people will wake up and see that Bitcoin is truly becoming centralized into something that resembled Beenz and Floodz from the 90's. Not a currency operated by the people, but a currency owned and operated by a few large corporations.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  Miners with 51% could make only 1MB blocks and orphan all larger ones. Your reasoning is only valid in cases where blocks from one fork aren't accepted on the other, but this isn't true for blocksize.

ikeboy 11y ago

The miners can refuse to make 20MB blocks. Unless the hard fork makes 1MB blocks invalid, which isn't being suggested. With less than 50% of miners, you can't force much of a backwards-compatible hard fork like this one. I had a discussion about this recently here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38xfw3/forking_dont_the_payment_processors_and_exchanges/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38xfw3/forking_don...