> You don't need the nodes to agree on anything. If they don't agree, they drop off the network
The miners by comparison, drop off the old BTC network making difficulty go down and others can now mine BTC.
Certainly miners can make this decision. What they can't do is force the market to value the new fork as worth anything, while they are burning energy to mine it and wasting opportunity cost of abandoning finite BTC.
The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin.
This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actual threat then?
Doesn't matter the majority of users have moved to the new fork. That becomes the new core.
>They can say that they have 10% of the mining power and threaten to not move over to the hard fork.
Why would this matter? That 10% of miners will move over quickly or lose money by mining on a fork with no value.
>Basically, they can scare people into thinking that there is going to be two separate, competing chains.
There would be but since the majority of users and miners and companies want the one you want theirs would be losing right?
>This would cause prices to crash , and crash hard.
Why? If the vast majority want the change then they will just continue on as normal. It's only the people still using the old fork that will have problems.
None of these problems exist if the majority truely wants the change.
> A fork that is not supported by the mining power is going to get easily attacked.
A chain that is attacked is easily going to shift to a different PoW that renders hundreds of millions of dollars of miner hardware obsolete. And the miners know it.
> I would argue that the fork is no longer Bitcoin
You can argue it all you like. Nodes define consensus in bitcoin, not miners.
> I haven't followed the drama super close
Clearly.
> as the adults stepping into the room and saying enough with the crazy ideas.
You mean like assuming that 80,000+ current bitcoin core reference node users are going to suddenly uninstall their node client software, and install a new unreviewed, untested node client? Because a bunch of suits got together in new york to have a pow-wow? In three months? You mean those adults?
> if they manage to get SegWit enabled
The only reason the nya is accelerating the adoption of segwit before aug 1 is because of these supposed uasf kool-aid drinkers. And isn't it kind of telling that this scalability that has been blocked by bitmain for a year is now suddenly good for everyone? Even though they've been blocking it for a year?
> it is frustrating right now due to scaling.
Take it up with bitmain. They've been blocking scalability for a year now. I'm not that concerned though. I'm happy with just the asicboost bug being fixed and no increased blocksize. Looks like I'm just going to get the blocksize anyway, and I can deal with that. But the hard-fork three months later? You can fork off onto china-coin if you want. I'll just continue using bitcoin.
> Agreed. If this soft and hard fork idea really goes through, it seems that now you are in fact getting the worst of both worlds: For your contract, you have to write code that apparently is very hard to get right and bug-free[1], while at the same time you are at the whim of a "community" -- whose decisions (sorry, "suggestions") can apparently be announced by one guy in a blog post -- not to deem what you are doing an "attack".
That's not really fair. His decree does not make it so. It still must be accepted by a majority of the miners, and this is and always has been a known property of the system. The collective will of the miners ultimately trumps the contract system. However, consensus there is purposely extremely difficult to achieve, and likely only possible in extreme cases like this.
Since this was a known property of the system, and since the agreement is inherently democratic, I don't see how this is a problem. Hard forks are simply another behavior of the network. Nothing more, nothing less.
Err... no. Nodes define and police consensus in bitcoin, not miners. It is the fact that nodes, and not miners, not agreeing to changes that miners want that would lead to the centralization of the network into miners hands, that is the entire argument about scalability and blocksize.
> them rejecting a change is the network saying no democratically
Yes, it is the nodes rejecting change that is leading to little to no change. The nodes have overwhelmingly agreed to an upgrade, and the largest miner, bitmain, is resisting it, so there may be some truth to the assertion that miners don't want this upgrade because they perceive they will lose profit from it. The fact that the nodes are looking to 'go over bitmains head' and implement this change without the need for the largest blocking miner, that is the entire reason the 'new york agreement' was developed in the first place.
But we do agree on the core issue. The lack of the ability to easily change is a feature of the design. The incentives are slightly misaligned with the implementation of asicboost, but for the most part, they function as expected.
> If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen?
If the rest of the community doesn't agree, then they will take they economic power away from the miners, change to a different mining/staking strategy, and leave the miners to mine an abandoned fork with a greatly decreased market cap.
It's not quite that simple - the chain will need to be forked with a protocol whose algorithm doesn't allow these miners to continue to dominate. And achieving consensus on that in the heat of the moment will be non-trivial.
Any fork that continues to use SHA-256 will be a trivial target for attack by these miners; they won't blindly continue to mine the "defunct" chain.
> If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation, having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of the new majority is valid.
No, that is a misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. If the miners activate a new ruleset, and if that change is not so very carefully constructed as to make the old rules a special case of the new rules (a soft-fork), then those miners fork themselves off the network no one automatically follows. The amount of hashpower on the fork has zero relevance to the validity of the blocks they are mining, from the perspective of an un-upgraded node.
> So yes, changing anything (hard-fork) is very difficult because it requires 100% consensus to be done well.
I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. It needs 51% to be done (nevermind done "well"), and then in theory more and more miners will cut their losses and start operating under the winning chain's rules.
Unless by "done well", you mean that transacting users and merchants aren't inconvenienced. Because a hard fork battle would be inconvenient for commerce if it wasn't a large majority. But miners don't necessarily need to care about that :)
>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.
Actually they can, they can technically just print more BTC by changing the protocol. Also I should remind you, Elon Musk (who is not even a miner) can devalue your token just by making a few tweets.
>There are always other miners that WILL take the money.
They can't do this if the other miners force a protocol change through as their blocks will start to get rejected, the only option then is to fork the chain.
>The Bitcoin difficulty equation has never changed. The math has not been changed. We have newer tx formats, and a newer signature scheme. We also have complete backwards compat.
This doesn't matter, the point is they have the ability to change all of it. Look at any of the bitcoin forks, this has already been done countless times. Saying "this will never happen to BTC" is certainly an opinion you can have, but it's not one based on any kind of objective "math and physics" reality of what they can or can't do. It's an opinion based on trust that they won't change it. You're trusting them to be the sole authority over the network.
>Do you really understand this?
Yes. Do you understand that all distributed systems have weaknesses and constraints, and are subject to change by their operators? Blockchains are not special here. Please don't trust anyone who designs these kind of systems and isn't forthcoming with a full description of the pros and cons.
> If the majority of miners agree to it then the rest of the network either goes along with it, or they're forced to do a hard fork themselves.
No. This isn't even remotely how the technology works. If the majority of the miners right now decide to start doing something different, they have simply excited the ecosystem. The existing network of users and clients will continue to use the remaining set of miners without having to do any active work to switch to them. In the mean time, the majority of miners that decided to go off in the corner and play their own game are going to start seeing defectors back to the "real" network they left behind as they are no longer making money mining as all of the new Bitcoin they are receiving isn't honored by any of the exchanges or stores or users until they convince people to start switching... a process that, for similar reasons of users wanting their transactions to be honored by other users, can't be done piecemeal. The miners simply don't have the power you claim they do.
> And what prevents greedy people from forming Bitcoin to remove (or increase) the maximum coin count and getting enough other geeedy miners to go along with it to be the majority fork?
The nodes define what a bitcoin is. So long as they agree that bitcoin should follow the original exponentially decreasing reward schedule, then that is what will happen.
There are some problems, for instance, if almost all miners decided to switch to another fork, then the original chain would simply die because of the difficulty. But miners have electricity bills to pay and are strongly incentivised to mine the most profitable chain. It is not a matter of convincing the miners, but of convincing the world that your uncapped fork is more valuable.
> But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining.
Define "force".
Because to me - if you are on a chain that has no future (as in the fork has more resources, better hash rate, better social support) then while you can continue to use the original, the odds that it holds any value is basically zero.
Same is true in the inverse - creating a fork and then expecting to be able to move any significant value off the original chain, when the original chain holds better social support and more resources, is usually folly.
Take bitcoin cash - which is a great example of this.
They split in 2017 and began trading at ~240 USD to bitcoins ~2700 USD. So they started with the assumption that their fork had roughly 1/10 of the value of bitcoin. Today they trade at 119 USD, to bitcoins 21170 USD (and this is after the HUGE drop over the last month): Roughly 1/200th the price.
Further - I strongly suspect that the reason BCH is still worth anything at all is that we're well into a crypto bubble - there are FAR too many completely worthless coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values. The fact that a usable chain forked from BTC for genuine technical reasons (and a social disagreement over segwit) drops so much value is a BAD sign for that group of original folks on the 59k chain.
They can certainly keep mining away on that chain, and if the goal is to still facilitate exchange only in that original chain, they're fine. The second they need to get off that chain and on to something else (whether it's another coin or USD) then they're probably fucked - their chain won't have held value, because value is a social construct, not a number on a chain.
> the case where you controlled the protocol on the machines of a partitioned network (eg., so you release a new version of btc which uses exploitable crytography
Such a change would be treated as a "monopoly money" fork by those wanting to transact, and ignored. "No I don't want your fake money; send me real BTC or GTFO". This is why miners cannot arbitrarily change the protocol in their favour even today.
> any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees
Can you explain how this jives with miners supporting Segwit2X, which brings both segwit and bigger blocks?
> Users have the money. If there's a fork, users can value one side higher than the other and then developers and miners will follow the money.
As the article shows, BTC's user side of the equation is actually controlled by a small group of investors. Thus, users like you and me have absolutely zero control or influence over the value of BTC, and are vulnerable to the manipulation done by this small group of investors.
We already saw BTC's value tank to half in a matter of days. How do you explain that as being something that meets the users' best interests?
The miners by comparison, drop off the old BTC network making difficulty go down and others can now mine BTC.
Certainly miners can make this decision. What they can't do is force the market to value the new fork as worth anything, while they are burning energy to mine it and wasting opportunity cost of abandoning finite BTC.
How is this an actual threat? Doesn't make sense.
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