Bitcoin Forum

https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/kycpoll/

To sum it up on the main points:

-Majority wants segwit

-Majority would support BIP148

-Majority doesn't want a hardfork

-Majority thinks that in the case of a hardfork, it should be prepared with at least 1 year of preparation

-Majority thinks miners should NOT have final word in protocol changes for Bitcoin

-Majority thinks Bitcoin should not be governed at all. Users have the final word on protocol changes.

PS: Forkers in denial and Roger sockpuppets will think this is a scam because it's hosted on Luke's website.

It looks to me like the majority of people answering this want things that are not compatible with one another, and are never going to happen.

If Luke is out there...

1. Where did you advertise the poll besides here and /r/bitcoin?
2. Do you have any way to know which sites/portals the respondents came from? (i.e., breakdown of r/bitcoin vs. r/btc)

The poll is not worthless, but it needs to be interpreted with care because while it may have been Sybil-resistant it has other obvious problems:

1. Luke is a strong SW and BIP148 supporter and this likely influenced who chose to participate.
2. The respondents are a self-selected population not a random cross-section.
3. Respondents concerned with privacy likely passed on completing the poll due to the data transmitted (including email address for example).

For me the biggest takeaways are that there is still very limited support for a PoW change even among people frustrated and concerned with miners' influence over bitcoin, and that a surprising number of people were OK with the notion of devs controlling the bitcoin protocol. I'd interpret the latter more as an expression of support and confidence in Luke and Core by respondents, and not necessarily as a belief that devs really should exercise a controlling influence. (Indeed, in a free market the users as a whole will always have the final say one way or another, making it a moot point.)

I can't see anyone saying that it's a "scam", that seems like a straw man.

It's obviously a legitimate poll, however it may be subject to biases because it's hosted on Luke's website, in the same way that Bitcoin.com's polls are subject to biases because they're hosted on Roger Ver's site (and their polls support block size increases).  No poll can promise to be 100% neutral but, hosted by people who are biased, we should be careful about trusting the results.

There's also the fact that we're talking about ~100 answers here, and that those answers could be from anyone, so if you're someone influential who strongly supports one side, you won't find it particularly hard to find 100 people or so to say that they agree with what you say.

Ideally, you would stratify the samples based on this.

First you pick a sample size - let's say 1,000.  Find out how many readers r/Bitcoin has (about 258,000), how many readers r/btc has (about 45,000), and how many active readers Bitcointalk has (people who have been logged in within x amount of time).  If you can find other places, include them.  Then you choose the number of readers to ask from each place based on how many users there are.

Then you use a random number generator to find random users from each place, depending on how many people use each place.

Then you have a neutral and accurate poll.

It's actually pretty accurate. I've spent some time reading about this situation here and on news sites and thought the same thing. If you look around you'll notice that people are scared of a hard fork. I know that they are generally scared of changes whatever they are, but they know how volatile bitcoin is, and a word "fork" makes them see a large red candle that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
So that's how it is, people are scared of segwit, but they know something has to be done. Hard forks and a possibility of centralization scare them even more. I don't see the results as a scam, I've felt like that for a long time and just got a confirmation.

1) Create an account on mturk.com
2) Ask to make an account on Coinbase
3) Ask to vote for x
4) Pay y$ (or maybe y altcoin) for it

It can be good for general purpose poll, but it isn't good for a Bitcoin poll.

Even full ETH supporters can vote here :)

Doesn't work that way. Coinbase is incredibly anal about identity and KYC. You are nuts if you think they will fall for the mturk troll. Try yourself and you'll see how your account gets invalidated in no time.

Im sorry that nobody wants JarzikCoin. This bullshit will be over soon and the hardforkers will be deleted from bitcoin history.

I'm not saying that they will be fake accounts with fake ids, just saying that with this kind of poll, it doesn't count the stake of the voter neither the invested money (like POW).

The all idea of Bitcoin is based on the fact that this kind of polls are meaningless as the democracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

POW is useless if people aren't accepting your work as valid, which is why miners and other state-sponsored actors want to get rid of people running nodes by increasing the blocksize to stupid levels (2MB is only the beginning, look at Bitmain roadmap, they want higher than 8MB by august 2018)

You could spend millions on huge trucks and other mining equipment and go dig a massive hole in the middle of the desert, that is a lot of Proof of work, but that means shit nothing if the people aren't validating it as valuable.

Miners = janitors.