Bitcoin Forum

It occurred to me today that bitcoin is not democratic.  The direction of the blockchain is determined by majority yes, but certain people hold more of it than others.   As I understand it, the biggest mining pools essentially determine which client to follow, and we trust them to always do what makes the most financial sense to them. 

As bitcoin's population we ride a delicate balance that is ripe with the seeds of conflict.  For now our attention is focused on bitcoin vs. regulation, but I have no doubt that someday internal changes will cause various bitcoin subgroups to be pitted against each other: either between big holders and little holders, or miners vs. traders, or devs vs. users.  One dev might introduce a change that is deemed profitable by some, and disastrous to others. A new client is introduced, some insist on a boycott, and then we have a problem.  I've been trying to research what happens with a true hard fork but any searchers are saturated with the recent news of the may 15th update.

Can someone actually explain what happens with a true hard fork? 
Will conflicting clients create persistently separate blockchains? 
Will someone's bitcoins exist within each blockchain? 
What major things could we expect?

Why not read this. It describes the aftermath of the situation you fear...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0

I definitely paged through it, and it does describe the aftermath of the unintentional hard fork, but I'm curious about what happens (specifically to the bitcoins) when it is intentional.  Imagine we have to opposed groups of bitcoin users using the old and new clients on purpose.

Democracy is a very bad thing in a world full of idiots.

^^^^^^^^^ !

There's destructive and non destructive hard forks.

Destructive hard forks would involve an update saying, "okay, you don't need a private key to spend someone's coins, you can also spend someone's coins by x or y". This would mean that on that version, you may lose your Bitcoins.

However, because of the sheer fact that pretty much everyone would oppose a destructive hard fork, it's something you don't need to be worried about.

Non destructive forks will just result people having different accounts of what transactions are confirmed or not. Your coins will still be there.

Amen to that.

100% agreed

Bitcoin is not democracy-rule or minority-rule, it's a consensus. What Bitcoin is to you is whatever client you choose to run. If the majority decide to adopt a hard fork that changes something in a way you don't like, you can choose to continue using the old client and connecting to a network with others who do the same.

Well, I think it's as much democratic as our current implementations of democracy in our political systems.

Sure, everyone has his vote, but you you need to get to know about someone and get convinced to vote for him. At the end of the day it turns out, that number of votes acquired is highly related to amount of money spent on campaign. It isn't 1-to-1 of course, as people's preferences and quality of offer also matter, but the best offer/idea without funding won't get as many votes as the worst offer/idea with huge funding. Number of votes for similar quality ideas will be strictly related to amount of funding spent on promoting them.

Democracy is a system where power is concentrated with people who invested the most in the system. This seems very similar to bitcoins to me.

I am less concerned that 1 CPU cycle - 1 vote is replacing 1 dollar - 1 vote (let's face it, it's much closer to the truth than 1 person - 1 vote).

I was originally more concerned with the solution to the Byzantine Generals' problem being proof of work, specifically computational work. Although it's very clever I wondered whether it isn't a bit arbitrary, as a measure.

Satoshi himself tried to address this worry, pointing out that the super-industrious villain controlling 80% of the CPU power would find it much more profitable (and definitely much easier, and far far less risky) to mine and keep the network stable than to undermine it (and his own wealth).

But then you wonder whether in some far future where mining returns are negligible and the returns are only transaction fees - maybe it changes?

It's very vague but I've come round to the point of view that the work done in mining and validating the network is a very real form of work, and represents almost the *ultimate* in value - entropic reduction* in its purest sense (similar to entropic reduction in diamonds or other crystals). Almost like "proof of work" is the key to getting "consensus of value".


*Has anyone ever tried to quantify the entropy reduction involved in finding a hash for a block? I wonder how that could be framed mathematically?

Tangents aside, this is interesting.  So suppose Alice has 100 BTC and she's running one client, can she send it to bob who's running a different version?

Bitcoin is getting a bit worrying at times for me I'll admit, but that's why I'm so glad it's open source, now anyone can create an alternate currency, I'm wondering if it would be possible for someone to create a wikipedia style currency which anyone can edit but people will of course argue that would be chaos :D

Not true.

On March 12th BTC Guild had many blocks mined using the v0.8 client.  Abandoning v0.8 meant a direct hit to their profits as a result of solved blocks that they'ld no longer receive the mined coins for.

What made BTC Guild switch to mining on the pre-v0.8 side of the fork? 

The response to one question ... "What side is Mt. Gox using?"

Mt. Gox recognizing mined coins on the pre-v0.8 side meant those coins would have value and the v0.8 ones would not.    So BTC Guild honored the will of the economic majority.
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

Now Mt. Gox doesn't automatically represent the economic majority, but in this specific instance hardly any of Mt. Gox's customers would give a care which action Mt. Gox took regarding this hard fork, so Mt. Gox essentially had sufficient representation that there didn't need to be any temperature taking to see where the economic majority stood, ... it was known immediately that v0.7 was the side of the fork that the economic majority sided with.

Wrong,
 News: All users of Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind versions 0.7.2 and earlier are required to upgrade to 0.8.1 or apply a manual workaround by May 15. More info.

It's up to the devs, and now bitpay where bitcoin goes.

Nobody can fork you to upgrade, however eventually an incompatible block will come along and the older version will be forked off.
You can choose to remain on the old fork. As long as 2+ nodes exist on that fork and at least one miner the network will continue.

That is the whole point 0.7.2 will always exist as long as users want it to.  Now if 99.999999% of users, merchants, service providers, and future development is on the 0.8.2 fork there may not be much value to your "legacy" coins but they will still exist.  If you can find someone who wants to exchange them you can't.

Well, yes, but it may or may not mean anything.

You have to realize that when you "send" a bitcoin nothing actually moves. It's not like you send a file from your computer to a recipient computer. With Bitcoin there is a public ledger in the cloud that contains info on where all the bitcoins in existence are (which addresses). So when you send a bitcoin all you're doing is telling the cloud to record that you've moved coins from your address to some other address. The cloud ledger is called the block chain.

Bitcoin is a protocol, just like HTTP. That means as long as you do things following the protocol you can experience a result. You can access websites on a computer with a web browser, or with a mobile phone app, or something else invented in the future like a robot. So with Bitcoin if you follow the protocol you can have a miner recognize and confirm your transaction (record it in the ledger) as valid. The only question, then, is which public ledger is the "right one" if different miner groups produce different ones? That's what a fork is, a situation where more than one possibly valid copy of the block chain exists.

Users then have to know which block chain to use, because technically both are "valid" (conform to the protocol). Also groups of miners can support both chains, by continuing to build on them. For users that would result in not knowing if transactions sent and received were actually confirmed (forever into the future) until the chains grew sufficiently apart. Their coins would be spendable on both chains until contradicting transactions happened. So for merchants or anyone accepting a payment they would have to know which version to honor as in step with the rest of their money transacting group. Externally, the price per bitcoin might, for example, be cut in half because everyone owning bitcoins could spend them twice, once with each version of the block chain, and different merchant groups might accept different versions.

So economically a hard fork can be extremely messy and confusing for a market. The bitcoin Bob received from Alice might be spendable at one shop, and not at another one next door, or it might not be accepted by anyone (what happens when one fork strand dies).

However, since nobody wants such a mess it's unlikely we'll ever see the well defined split of enough hash power to cause a fork. It's better for all if everyone remains on the same page. Still, a hard fork is possible, but also survivable. Hard fork risks are another reason it's good for the cryptocurrency economy as a whole to have viable alt-coins as options.

I'm going to disagree.

The world is filled with idiots yes. 
Picking somebody randomly to make important decisions is however is still a good idea.

How does "picking somebody randomly to make important decisions" remain a good idea?

No.. Bitcoin is as democratic as you can get.

Because there's nothing which says "you must use bitcoin or forfeit your life," that makes it significantly more democratic than any "current implementations of democracy."

The same is not true for the aforementioned "current implementations of democracy."  Suppose I live in the US and I do not support any war. The fact is that I am required "by law" to fund it. What that means is if I refuse to fund it (by not paying taxes), I can face many years in a cage, and if I resist, I can be shot. Yes, I'm permitted to verbally disagree, yet I have no freedom to disagree financially.

If I disagree with "bitcoin," the alternatives do not threaten my person or property.

If the work of a person has value in a factory, the work of a machine should have at least the same value if that machine does the same job within the same timeframe.


So, doing what miner's do, computing all those hashes... has value just as if a person were doing it.

Because a random idiot is more trustworthy than anybody else.  Because thats the best we can do knowing what corruption our wetware is capable of generating.

Well, actually we can't even do that.  Juries these days are sadly always pre-screened.

If you can think of a better way to resolve a double spend, please do let us know. 

I don't follow this logic. Are you saying I should trust a random idiot more than someone who has established trust with me?


If you mention you support jury nullification, you'll be disqualified.

Random idiots are often swayed by the appearance of authority. Random idiots, in groups, often justify the use of violence against non-violent individuals.


I never claimed I had such a solution. I only wondered if "picking somebody randomly to make important decisions" was truly a good principle or not.

Not exactly.  I'm staying that someone who has an established relationship with you may not be impartial to the decisions which involve you.  For example, you might trust your best friend more than a random idiot to be a juror at your trial.  But is that a more rational solution in the interest of fairness and justice than a random idiot?  Probably not. 

The trick is you have to get somebody to make the decision that everybody agrees is the right person.  Democritus solved this problem by picking a citizen at random.  He would certainly disagree with the voting for a representative of the people, even before realizing the charade of insecure voting practices.   


That is scary.  Kind of like having a copy of the constitution on you is evidence you are a subversive enemy of the state. 


Very good points.  In bitcoin, the random idiot who secures a block of transaction can remain relatively anonymous.  Lets hope the formation of pools doesn't wind up too much fortelling your second issue there. 


This was the original proposal by Democritus.  He wrote that a better solution was to use a random idiot.  Well OK, maybe he didn't use the word idiot :)  In any case, Satoshi's solution for the double spending problem is very much along the lines of what Democritus wrote, and seems to work pretty well so far.