Bitcoin Forum

Is the word 'voting' an accurate way to describe what Bitcoin miners are doing?

As in Bitcoin miners vote on which transactions are correct? Essentially a weighted vote based upon mining power?

I know how a blockchain works, just curious if others believe this is a fair way to describe the process.

I think they aren't doing it right and i will tell you what are they doing wrong.

Bitcoin already has 10 years and double spend still a problem on the chain, and that's because a miner will go for the transaction with bigger fees than the transaction who was first on the network. Miners want money and that's their priority. But this way we will never fix the double spend issue.

This is just my point of view but maybe I'm wrong.

that is not how "blockchain" works.
miners aren't voting on anything, they are "workers" that are constantly "competing" in a cut throat business to find blocks. they are not responsible for verifying and validating transactions. they only find blocks then ask nodes for valid transactions to include in those blocks. the nodes are responsible for validation and they don't vote on anything either. everyone is validating on its own.

the only thing in all of this that may seem like a "vote" is when changes are involved. for example when we plan on a fork to add some new feature or remove something. then it falls to miners to "vote" by accepting the new change or reject it. which usually happens by changing the block version and adding a bit or two to it.

I think 'voting' is not the right term on what miners are doing since in the end, there'd be only one miner who will get the right solution and include transactions in a block. It's more of who gets the correct answer first and getting priveleges to include what transactions would they want to prioritize. No voting process/mechanism is happening whatsoever in the mining process; voting for miners only becomes active during a chain split/fork.

You might have confused "voting" with "tx validation".  ;)

We tend to associate "voting" with the action of the miners, when they choose what version of the Bitcoin software they want to run, when a new implementation are introduced with a fork.

Miners will validate that person A has say 0.01 bitcoins to give before they add the transaction to a block.  ;)

This is not a situation of miners greed, it's rather how the network has been created. It allows transactors tobdetermine how fast they want their transaction to take. The higher the fee the highest the priority and the faster it's confirmation. This does not result in double spending either.

I could be wrong, but the way I understand it, miners can choose which transactions their nodes accept and put in a block. They're not voting per se as the confirmed transactions depend on which miner actually mines the block. I guess they can "vote" or at least let their opinions be heard by not choosing to mine certain transactions like in this case (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9sex11/jihan_no_longer_includes_segwit_transactions_last/).

You said it right. Now, I understand things better when it comes to how Bitcoin miners are doing their things as far as the many transactions in the network is concern. Vote can only be involved when there can be a fork and this had been shown in the past many years where dramatic exchange of debates happened. On mining, I think that small miners are now on a big disadvantaged compared to big miners and this is why many have already left the Bitcoin mining business either leaving the industry altogether or refocus their mining activities to other coins at hand.

that is still not "voting" though. it is a "choice" to reject certain transactions. and it is not just SegWit transactions (which I haven't seen happening like that reddit link is saying) it is also the fee thing which they are rejecting any transaction that has low fees (like lower than 1 satoshi/byte or even 0). and is also not "voting". and it can be mitigated by having more competition in the scene.

Voting to choose which correct transaction is impossible because each transaction cannot know who did it.
The blockchain only functions as a place where we can see all transactions happening without being able to intervene in the transactions carried out.

The act of choosing which transaction to include in a block is not collective, every mining pool or solo miners prepares the list of transactions that they are going to include in the next block, then they start mining, meaning finding a nonce that will result in a hash with certain amount of leading zeroes. If you are asking this question, you probably don't understand how blockchain works well enough.

Nah, I understand blockchain quite well. Just trying to work on a cryptocurrency that allows everyone to mine as if they had an equal amount of hashing power. I kind of liked likening ourselves to voting and democracy where everyone's voice is treated the same.

But maybe calling it voting is a little bit too abstract.

You could say that in the case of double spends, which is the whole purpose for miners, that miners vote on which transaction is correct.. but that's quite rare since the system works so well. lol