I agree, but the other path I've heard proposed is for miners to force a hard fork to lift supply cap and keep subsidizing the network with inflation. I think that's even less true to bitcoin's original ethos.
(I also think it overestimates the power that miners have to unilaterally hard fork and have the community accept it, but so goes)
How could the miners soft fork to increase the bitcoin supply? That would be a hard fork, because they will not be able to spend those "higher" coinbase outputs, which are seen as lower to the rest of the network.
>An uncoordinated group can also hard fork the network
What are you talking about? An unintentional hard fork, or an intentional one like BCH?
>The idea that bitcoin is inflation proof is simply nonsense, even ignoring all the analysis
The idea that you can make inferences based on technical analysis alone is based on flawed assumptions.
The bitcoin block reward distribution is not finished yet, so it is too early to say. But I predict that it will be too deflationary, which will harm the network in the long run by creating incentives for selfish mining attacks [0].
>the stablecoin issuers can cause that themselves just by printing infinite numbers of stablecoins and dumping them onto the bitcoin market
That only works insofar as users (irrationally) trust stablecoins disproportionately compared to bitcoin. Eventually they will cash out and the ponzi scheme will fall apart.
Honestly maybe it will fork, and maybe that will be a good change. We don’t exactly know how the dynamics of mining will play out in a post-block reward world, maybe it’s actually better to keep mining at the current block reward size indefinitely rather than decrease all the way to zero. Very slow fixed inflation is not necessarily that different than having a hard cap on supply. Gold is still being mined too.
If it forked in a way that completely defeated the limited supply and led to rapid inflation then it would massively tank in value and miners would lose a lot of money. That’s a pretty good incentive for them not to destroy it.
As far as bitcoin existential threats go, there are many of them - the energy cost, a 51% attack, so much concentration of mining in China, etc. Miners mutually colluding to destroy their own investments is not at the top of my list of worries.
> Since a hard fork would require agreement from essentially everyone involved in Bitcoin, there's essentially no chance of this limit being increased.
The bitcoin network underwent a hard fork a couple weeks ago due to a bug in the implementation of the on-disk database.
The developers reached out to the mining pools and got the vast majority downgraded within 8 or 12 hours. A day or two later a new version was pushed out that mimicked the old behavior up until the point that a supermajority of nodes were upgraded, and then switched to the new behavior.
Forks have happened before, and the community is close-knit enough to resolve them. Everyone's primary goals are a) being ideologically neutral and b) keeping the network running, in equal measure.
This is true, they could hard-fork the chain and make that the new Bitcoin but this is where a bit of Game Theory comes in - why would the network collectively do something to harm it's own self? Bitcoin miners are incentivized to keep up the security AND stick to the 21 million limit laid down by the Bitcoin Whitepaper. If hypothetically the network decides to change the limit, I believe that would just destroy the Bitcoin narrative and so no miner would even agree to do that.
Any change to bitcoin's supply algorithm requires a hard fork of the blockchain. People have done it before but those forks are considered worthless by the community.
You're right that it is a community belief. If enough people were convinced that supply should be increased, they could fork the blockchain and move to the new chain. The change in supply would alter the price appropriately.
But that's no different to the community belief that it has any value to begin with. If everybody was convinced that gold was worthless (outside of its practical industrial uses), it would cease to be a store of value too.
The entire basis of the article is wanting it to not be a fork. If they have a majority of miners, they are in theory able to set the rules for actual bitcoin.
I think you have this completely wrong. Bitcoin avoids hard forks by all means, they implement soft forks.
Ethereum uses hard forks often an liberally. This new change is a hard fork. In a hard fork those that want to stick with the old rules of the game are not coerced to follow the new ones, they can just follow their way.
In fact, there has been talk of creating an ETHPoW which would continue the PoW chain. We will see how that pans out but is likely to be a mayor flop because support for it is negligible.
A minority-miner pow-chain quickly loses credibility. If say a 67% coalition of miners say that a hard-fork will not happen, then the 33% coalition of miners are in a bind, even if the exchanges choose to support the 33% -- which they won't, because it's too vulnerable to double-spend attacks.
Ergo, the minority-miner pow-chain must either also hard-fork the mining algorithm (to require investment in new hardware), or hard-fork to a non-PoW system.
I do understand your definition of a hard-fork. What I'm talking about is a protocol-extrinsic, cryptoeconomic justification of my argument. There's a game of chicken involved, for example.
I don't know of a single responsible bitcoin developer that wouldn't prefer using soft-forks to hard-forks. Bitcoin has had hard-forks in the past, but they have been done in response to a specific issue, and were done very quickly. What's most important, everyone agreed that the hard-fork had to be done.
The current attempt by Coinbase to force a contentious hard-fork is dangerous. There are many people that even question its requirement, let alone whether it can be done safely.
I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but it isn't going to be done quickly, and if it is finally going to happen, it'll be managed by the core developers.
We could easily solve this BTC problem by hard forking to a pure proof of stake consensus protocol for BTC. Same security and decentralization guarantees. No environmental harm, and far more scalable so you can actually buy coffee with it. Ofc that's against the best interests of miners and BTC core devs.
I'm surprised this comes out now, right in the middle of the noise about the UASF (User Activated Soft Fork) and Segregated Witness controversies.
The community is pushing to enable larger blocks among other functionalities that would cult down on the fees that miners (read: Chinese miners) collect.
Obviously the miners won't agree on that, but the network agreement depends on what the Bitcoin processing power decides, not on what the majority of the users do. At some point either the miners join, the users give up, or the chain forks in two (obviously with wildly different valuations).
I'm not familiar with People.cn, but my first reaction with the headline is that the piece of news has second intentions.
Given how hard it is for the community to do something as simple as increase the block size a tiny bit, I'm not confident that a fork could fix such a problem.
But you do make a good point, miners are centric to the platform. However, they have to all agree in order to make their opinion matter. Which requires a very strong opposition to the hard fork, in this case the hard fork is the best option so they'll agree either ways.
(I also think it overestimates the power that miners have to unilaterally hard fork and have the community accept it, but so goes)
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