It is thanks to people like you that early adopters are making money with bitcoin: the very fact that there weren't many buyers back then.  The early adopters get the money that later investors pour into it.  Why do these later investors pour their money into the pockets of early adopters ?  Because they too, think that they are still early, and that still more, later investors will poor still more money into it, so that it fills THEIR pockets.  And why would these still later investors do THAT ?  Because they think that they are still early, and that there will be still still more still still later investors who will put in still still more money to get it into *their* pockets.  And so on.
This is called "greater-fool theory".  You are willing to be a fool and give your money away so that earlier adopters get it directly from you, because you are convinced that you will find greater fools than you are, who will put even more money into it, this time to fill directly YOUR pockets.  And why do you think that such greater fools than you will come around ?  Simply because these too, think that there are STILL GREATER FOOLS to be found.

Of course, one day, anything based upon greater fool theory has to come crashing down, simply because one runs out of greater fools.  But that doesn't mean that you cannot use that theory.  As long as there are REALLY greater fools out there, you can find them to fill YOUR pockets (at THEIR expense).

In the end, the "last layer" of greater fools will spend fortunes, and lose it.  These fortunes are exactly the sum of all benefit that has been made by previous "greater fool gamers".  If you make the sum of all gains (that is, money obtained when selling, minus money spent when buying) of all "investors", this is exactly going to be equal to the amount of money poured in by the last layer of greater fools.

The whole difficulty of greater fool theory is to know WHEN this will happen.  If you think you're smart and step in, you might very well be one of those suckers of the last layer, financing everything that has been pumped out of it by your predecessors from whom you bought the stuff ; but you might also be in a lower layer, getting your pockets filled by suckers that come after you.

The advice to jump into bitcoin or not, if your goal is to get money out of other people's pockets and into yours, depends on where one estimates one actually is versus that final moment of last layer of suckers.  Now, given that bitcoin's adoption is still small, and there's 95% of the world population to be convinced, it is very well possible that you are still in an early phase, and that you can still pump a lot of money out of a next layer of suckers.  But it might also be that if bitcoin tries several times to get beyond the $1000 barrier, and doesn't succeed, that people start to wonder if it can still get much higher.  That will be the fatal end signal for more greater fool suckers to get into it, and will also announce that all holders of that moment are the final layer of suckers.  But it can also still last for 50 years and attract 40% of the world population, and crash down when the price reaches $1 million or so.

The property of greater fool theory is that the last layer is not predictable.  The longer you wait, the riskier it gets.

The notion of a decentralized, trustless system, which is the motivation for bitcoin, and the basis for most of (at least grassroots) crypto, is incompatible with central authority and (hence) law.

This very simple truth is overlooked by almost all people wanting to have some "compliance" with crypto.  Crypto has at its core, an anarchist principle.

Now, one can say that this is bullshit, and that one CAN use crypto in a perfectly legal, law-abiding and state-pleasing way.  And that's true.  But the problem is that crypto is then a clumsy, wasteful, slow, and silly game.  All the difficulty, all the user-unfriendlyness, all the wasted storage, network and computing effort that makes crypto into what it is, is needed to get this (illusionary ?) decentralization and trustlessness.   But IF you comply to law and the central authority of the state (these are two almost identical notions), then you *are* trusting a central authority.  And then you don't NEED to go through all that hassle.  As such, any competing system that *uses* this trust in state and law, will be much more lean, fast, practical, and in the end, safe (as long as state and law are safe) than what crypto can offer, and crypto is, in that scope, a losing proposition.

It is not so much a matter of whether one prefers an anarchist view frame, or a legalist/statist view frame ; it is rather that crypto has the first one at its core, and that it loses most of its sense and competitive edge in the second view frame.  This is like go sailing with an airplane.   An airplane is made to fly, and not to float.  Yes, you can make a sailing floating airplane, but that's not a competitive sailing boat.

Ah, I saw the monetary creation from a PoW point of view, while you see it from a PoS point of view.  But this is somewhat strange, and at first sight, I wonder if such a system doesn't beg the question.

If I understand your premise, it goes as follows: given a crypto currency with a coin X, and we want to peg coin X's value to, say the dollar (let us assume for a moment that the dollar is a stable unit of value - which it more or less is in the short term), then if ever market forces push X over $1,- then enough new coins are minted such that its inflationary pressure lowers X back to $1,-.  If ever X gets below $1,-, then enough coins are burned so that the scarcity of X makes X back to $1,-.  

Your comments seem to point that these new coins, or those burned coins, are distributed according to stake.   Let us suppose that at a certain point, Joe has 20 X in his account, and Jack has 30 X in his account.  Suppose now that X rises in price, and the amount of X has to triple.  In perfect PoS distribution, this means that Joe now has 60 X in his account, and Jack has 90 X in his account.  The next day, X crashes on the market, and the number of X has to be divided by 5 and burned to maintain the price.  Joe now has 12 X in his account, and Jack has 18 X in his account.

All the time, X is near $1,- but Joe first had $20, then it rose to $60, and then it fell to $12.

In what way is this different from not changing the amount of X at all ?

Suppose that Jack had to pay Joe something that was worth $10.  Each time, Jack will have to pay Joe 10 X.  
If this happened first, then Joe would end up with 30 X and Jack with 20 X.    This would then rise to 90 X resp. 60 X, to fall back to 18 X resp 12 X.  If it happened second, Joe would have 70 X and Jack would have 80 X, to fall back to 14 X and 16 X respectively.  And if it happened at the end, Joe would have 22 X and Jack 8 X.

So depending on where it happened, at the end of the day, Joe would hold ($18 resp. $14, resp. $22), and Jack would hold ($12 resp $16 resp $8).

Consider now a coin, Y, that is like X, but doesn't do this adjustment.  Initially, Joe has 20 Y and Jack has 30 Y.  At first, Y is at $1, then it rises to $3, and then it falls to $0.6.
This means that Joe initially had $20, then he had $60 and in the end he had $12 worth in his account: EXACTLY as with X.

Suppose now that Jack has to pay Joe something worth $10.  If it happens first, Joe will get 10 Y from Jack, and he will  have hence 30 Y and Jack will have 20 Y.  At the end of the day, Joe will have then $18, and Jack $12.

If the payment happens second, Jack will have to pay Joe 3.33Y ($10 at $3 per Y).  Joe will now hold 23.33Y and Jack will hold 26.66Y.  At the end of the day, Joe will have $14 (23.33 Y at $0.6), and Jack will have $16 (26.66 at $0.6).  If the payment happened at the end, Jack will have to pay Joe 16.66Y so Joe would hold 36.66 Y and Jack would hold 13.33 Y, so Joe has $22 worth of Y, and Jack, $8.

As we see, the value that people hold is exactly the same for coin X, and coin Y.  There's no point in doing this inflation and deflation: a coin that doesn't do it, has exactly the same effect.

What one actually does, with this inflationary game, is simply to change the measurement unit.  But there's no stability at all in held sums.  If you have an account containing a value of $200, initially, this fluctuates just as much in X than in Y.   There's no monetary point in trying to peg the unit.

Well, if I were a miner that agreed with other miners and with a majority of users on a rule set, *against a whole bunch of non-mining full nodes that do not want this rule set*, I'd have all reasons to set up sufficient infrastructure to have my node accept thousands of incoming connections.  After all, if I'm a miner, I have enough resources to do so, no ?  Compared to the investment in the hashing resources that I have to own, or I have to rent, this network resource enabling me to allow users to connect to me or to a few of my peers seems small I' d think.
If we are, say, 5 mining pools owning 95% of hashing power agreeing on the rule set, we could set up each one of us, a big publicly known node that accepts a lot of incoming connections. 

In reality, if you use someone else's software to set up your full node (for instance, if you download bitcoin core) you are already not in a trustless situation, because you trust the author of the software.  Truly trustless would imply that you implement the rules yourself in your own full node software, according to the principles (the "rule set") that you intend to require.  In practice this is not feasible of course, but this simply illustrates the silliness of the concept of trustlessness when taken to the extreme. 

I would think it is simpler: can't you just connect directly to the mining pool node with whom you are in agreement concerning the rules, and that's the only connection you really need ?  Of course, the number of connections that this node accepts may be limited...


Well, it can't be debased until miners and users decide so.

In fact, and I'm very surprised that this didn't happen yet, I wonder how it comes that people create alt coins with a new genesis block, and not as a hard fork from bitcoin.   If you create an alt coin which is a hard fork from bitcoin (that is, which takes as initial distribution, the unspend outputs on the bitcoin block chain at a certain block number, and whose private keys can sign a single transaction on the altcoin's block chain) you do away with all the problems of premine, initial distribution and so on, and you buy this coin the whole bitcoin user base.
We've seen this with the ETC/ETH split: all ETH holders were now also ETC holders.  In the ETC/ETH split, the two coins are very similar, but there's no need: the forked-off coin can be entirely different, just like an altcoin is different.  The only thing that is taken from bitcoin is the user base and the initial distribution.  As such, there can even be no need for mining/minting the coin any further.

If ever this happens, and I don't see how this can not happen in the future, you have ACTUALLY the same effect as a debasement.  The bitcoin market cap will split over both coins (of course, initially with the large majority still on bitcoin).

Sound money doctrine is misguided, because it makes the assumption of a single, unique monetary asset.  When monetary assets are in competition, and can be created/forked/... then there's no such thing as a sound money doctrine, by the flexibility of the market for monetary assets, and the variability of the market cap of each asset.  The creation of new assets automatically debases the "fixed number" ones.

I never contradicted that.   My point was simply that non-mining nodes have no way to impose their rules on the system.  That's all I said.   That holds.  In order to see the "power" or rather the absence of power of the full nodes, of course you have to "undo" them of all the other possible elements that might have power, so that these element's power is not confused and taken as a proof that it are the full nodes themselves that have this power.  As such, we have to, artificially, consider full nodes that have no links with users, nor with miners.  And then we see that these "naked" full nodes, even if they are in a large majority (because you fired 100 000 of them up on amazon), cannot impose their rules.

On the other hand, users, even with light weight wallets, DO impose their rules, through their decision to support, or not to support, the market cap.  They don't need to run a full node themselves, they can configure their light weight wallet to connect directly to the mining nodes that run their preferred version of the rules.  They do this by simply voting with their money, dumping the coins if they don't like it.

So users have power through their decisions to sustain, or not, the market cap and miners don't want to disgruntle them, because miners depend on the money spending/coin buying users to dump their coinbase on them.

All this was very clearly illustrated during the ETH/ETC split.

I can only be happy that the price of monero goes down somewhat.  There's no good for a coin that wants to be anonymous to have a market cap mainly sustained by speculation ; no good can come out of a greater-fool game.  However, I hope it doesn't sink too low either, because some market cap is needed in order to be used as a currency.  I'd be happy with something like $4-$5.  That's still highly speculative because its demand for usage is not so large (bitcoin itself must not be much higher in real usage market cap than at most a few 10 of $).

Indeed, you've got it.  It is too much seen as "evil guys vs good guys".  One should see it as "rule set A" vs "rule set B".  If users and miners agree on rule set B, then no matter how many non-mining full nodes only accept rule set A, this doesn't enforce rule set A at all (whether rule set A is the "historical" or the "new" rule set doesn't matter here).

You are right that IF there's a vast majority of non-mining full nodes with rule set A, then a user connecting RANDOMLY to just a full node will most probably only see a "stopped" block chain.  The user has to specify a miner node that follows rule set B in order to get his transactions through, and get the live block chain (according to rule set B).  So a vast swarm of disagreeing non-mining full nodes can somehow perturb a bit the network, until users configure their wallets to ignore them, and only go to rule-B miner nodes.

And in fact, this is a very good thing, because otherwise, the attack of launching 100 000 full nodes with a different rule set would impose that different rule set, which is against the very idea of PoW securing the block chain: a sybil attack with full nodes would be sufficient if it were true that non-mining full nodes impose their rule set.

Purely technically, as you point out, only miners need to agree amongst themselves to use rule set B, and then only a block chain according to rule set B will be built.  But, as was pointed out regularly, and as was used erroneously as an argument indicating the power of non-mining full nodes, miners will not want to alienate users.  Technically, they can, but economically, they would ruin themselves, because alienating the users who sustain the market cap, and who are finally the buyers of their minted coins would kill the revenue of the miners, as they will now technically mine coins nobody wants to buy.

But an army of non-mining full nodes, in disagreement with the miners (and the users) has no power to impose its rule set, whether that rule set is a "new" one (a kind of sybil attack with an army of nodes) or the "old one" (as "guardians of immutability").  They can at most initially perturb the communication of transactions and blocks, and will in the end be ignored.

That was my point.

Indeed, and even if you *say* that you have no belief or confidence in the fiat systems, in fact that is not true, if you introspect sufficiently.  What you do here, is taking an intellectual stance, and because you see a dissonance between what is publicly told what are the principles of the fiat system, and what you think/know is really behind it, you find that it is a system that doesn't deserve your confidence or belief.  But that is from an abstract point of view, when you analyse the system intellectually.   But this is *not* the kind of belief that we are talking about.  In reality, you *do* believe in the fiat system in the following sense: I'm pretty sure that you believe that if one way or another, you've got a suitcase full of (real) 100-dollar bills, that a lot of people are going to do a lot of stuff for you to obtain them.  In other words, the "belief in the system" doesn't matter, the belief in other people's acceptance of that stuff against goods and services matters.
And, unless you are totally deluded, which I'm sure you aren't, you will agree with me that a lot of people would be willing to *accept* a suitcase of dollar bills against things that have quite some value.  As long as many people think the same, the monetary belief system remains in place, no matter what you might "intellectually" think of the failure of the system at hand.


In fact, there's a quite easy way to do so.  If you start from bitcoin, you simply don't adapt the difficulty as a function of the time it takes to make a block, but simply to a kind of long-term Moore's law estimation.  As such, the higher the bitcoin market price goes, the more interesting it is to mine, and as the difficulty doesn't get adapted, you mine more and more coins in a given time unit.  The inflationary pressure will then lower the price of a coin to where the mining costs of a coin (which are now fixed) coincide with the market price of a coin.  
The problem here would be unexpected technological advances in mining, which make it cheaper faster than Moore's law.  The other problem is that making the currency is as profitable as obtaining it through selling goods and services, so in the end, there's no incentive to use it as a currency...

The problem is that such a perfect currency would never catch on, because 95% of crypto is about speculation for "moon".  If you build a system that doesn't allow to dream about the moon, but is simply a good stable currency, nobody's going to "invest" in it, and it wouldn't take off.

I think iamnotback is referring to the disruption of what makes a monetary asset into a monetary asset: a recursive belief system, while you are referring to market forces of offer and demand.  Of course, both are related, but iamnotback is perfectly right when he talks about hyperinflation as the breakdown of the recursive belief system.

After all, why does a monetary asset have monetary value ?  It is because Joe considers it of value and is willing to give goods and services to obtain some, because he believes that Jack will also give goods and services for it, because Joe believes that Jack believes that Mary will accept goods and services against it, and Joe believes that Jack believes that Mary believes that... Joe will accept it against goods and services.  In other words, there is a community of users of that monetary asset that believes that each of them believes that each of them believes that .... believes that others in the community will accept it.
This is a bi-stable system: or everybody believes it, and the belief is self-sustaining ; or essentially nobody believes it, and that non-belief is also self-sustaining.  It is like many bi-stable systems, with isles of stability, and regions of instability (transition zones) between them.

When the belief is not there, the "value" of the asset is near zero.  It doesn't have to be strictly zero.  It can have "fun" value (collector value, joke value, ....).  When the belief is there, it has a significant value.  What value ?  Well, THAT will be determined by the market of course, by offer and demand.

During a transition zone from non-belief to belief, there is a speculative region which looks a lot like a "greater-fool game".  Early adopters may think that if the asset is going to get generally believed to hold value, they can still get hold of it for not much.   During the onset of a monetary asset, fortunes can be made.  In fact, a monetary asset usually starts its journey as a "speculative bubble that fails to pop".

The transition from belief to non-belief, hyper inflation, is in fact, that speculative bubble that finally pops.

A speculative bubble of which the main or sole drive is "greater fool theory" has to pop, because one runs out of greater fools.  But with a monetary asset, one doesn't need a GREATER fool, just a SAME fool.  This is why the infinitely recursive belief system is sustainable: the same entity can appear several times in it (like in my example: Joe believed in Jack who believed in Mary who believed in Joe accepting the asset).  There's no expectation of gain.

Now, whether an external event has as a consequence a price fluctuation (a "crash" for instance) or has as a consequence a hyperinflation, depends on whether the stability island of the belief system is left or not.

Zero argument in this post.

The post you link to is no argument against my statement, because it starts with the premise that the *users* are not in agreement with the *bad miners*, an assumption that I explicitly do not make.  As I pointed out several times, each time that you think you have an argument for "non mining full nodes" to be "guardians of the rule set A", you give IN FACT an argument why it are USERS or MINERS that are the guardians of the rule set A (over the rule set B that the 'bad guys', that is to say, the miners and the users, actually want).

Until you explain me where my ultimate proof is logically flawed, you have lost the argument.  My proof goes as follows: if you think that non-mining full nodes impose the rule set, and bitcoin is now running on rule set A with, if I'm not wrong, something like 6000 full nodes, then fire up 100 000 full nodes with rule set B on Amazon, and see how the network will now comply to rule set B, the vast majority of the "guardians of the rules" according to you.

My statement in that gedanken experiment is that your 100 000 nodes will not get one single block, and will certainly not enforce their rules on the network.  As such, they have no power to do so.

All your arguments showed that full nodes DO INFORM their owners.  But in as much as these informed people are not miners, or are not users (that is, they do not determine the market cap), this fact doesn't influence the consensus.

Essentially, the consensus is made between the miners (building the block chain, using their mining nodes) and the users (setting the market cap).  How many OTHER full nodes are running that haven't anything to do with either, doesn't matter apart from some better network properties.

This is soooo socialist: people deciding about who should obtain other people's money

In a free market, you "deserve" something for a service, what people are willing to give you to obtain that service.  So as long as "devs" obtain what they obtain through their work, because people hand them over their money voluntarily, they "deserve" it.

That said, it is really surprising how much people are willing to hand over to devs from their own money, because they hope to get even more money from still greater fools, once they have joined "early" the crowd around the devs.  The Force is great in this greater fool stuff.

I'm even wondering whether I cannot launch "nocoin".  The particularity of nocoin is that it has no code, and I'm the principal maintainer of that absence of code.  It also has the advantage of not having a block chain, and as such, all discussions about the limitations of storage and so on are absent from nocoin.   There is also no danger about hardforking in nocoin: consensus is always reached.

I'm trying to get nocoin accepted at some major exchanges, but I have to say that the negotiations are difficult.   As there is no code or block chain, the presence on exchanges of nocoin is essential.  I was thinking of an initial offer of $10 for a nocoin, and I'm offering at this moment 2 million nocoins which will hopefully available on exchanges soon.  In fact, I'm even willing to offer a no-coin for $5 for the first million coins !  This is your opportunity !
Even better !  If you are interested, send bitcoins to this address and send me a private message here with the transaction ID, and I'll grant you the nocoins you've paid for once I get them on exchanges:

1NmFL2kVN4VWmDHZwycqQg6EMa2o4w7QyB

200 nocoins for a bitcoin !  let me know !
Limited offer !
Nocoin will boom, because it is way, way better than bitcoin or the existing altcoins: they don't consume any resources !  They can trade as fast as the website of the exchange you're on, and they surely will outpace bitcoin in a few years time.  You will regret not having bought your nocoins when they were at bargain prices !  Moreover, nocoins are perfectly anonymous and untraceable: there's no block chain that can be analysed !  There's even no IP sniffing possible: the code doesn't exist,and there is no network protocol that could be hacked !


 

You don't win an argument by quitting it and declaring yourself a winner, you know.  As I pointed out, that has too much of a self-referential PoS attitude .

You didn't "win" any argument, because you never considered the gedanken experiment I proposed to you, and you are always including *something else* in your counter argument, hence not debunking my statement at all.
You only win an argument by pointing out the LOGICAL errors in the presented argument of the opponent with correct logical arguments.  No ad hominem, no self-referential declarations of victory, and no argument of authority is part of the class of logical arguments.

My gedanken experiment, which I agree, is artificial, proves clearly the futility of non-mining nodes BY THEMSELVES as "guardians of the rules": you can fire up 100 000 such nodes which "guard another set of rules", and that vast majority doesn't do zilch to the consensus, even if they all scream that their rules are not followed.  As such, non-mining nodes, even if they make up the vast majority, don't impose ANYTHING.  Which was my statement.  I never said anything else.

The consensus is made by "miners", where I understand by miner: the entity that *decides* upon which chain to build and hence also runs a (mining) full node ; people selling mining power to that miner (people owning asics) ; and users.

If these three classes of entities agree upon a set of rules, then THAT consensus will prevail.  Whatever the non-mining full nodes NOT BELONGING TO ONE OF THESE CLASSES may use as rules.

What is artificial in my gedanken experiment is of course to separate the USERS from the non-mining full nodes.  Most of the time, those running full nodes are also users.  And users ARE important in the consensus, because they determine the market cap, and hence also the revenues of the miners, and hence of course the miners will not go against the users.

In all your counter examples which are valid by themselves, you have to include or "disgruntled users" or "disgruntled miners" or "disgruntled mining power owners" with the full nodes you consider, to "show" that these nodes keep the consensus, and as such, your demonstration failed each time, because it didn't single out the non-mining non-user related full node as the consensus keeper, at all.

Again my proof that a large majority of non-mining, non-user related full nodes doesn't impose the consensus is simple: fire up 100 000 of them on amazon, and make them impose another rule set.  It won't work.  So their majority doesn't imply consensus. QED.

I think you are falling in the self-referential trap of PoS.  It is not because you claim that I lost, that I did.  But given the fact that you think that you are the stake holder deciding on who lost, you take your own signing off of the statement that I lost as the true chain, don't you

The point is that *you* lost since quite a while, but because you didn't even get the gedanken experiment that I proposed.  Now *I* sign off this statement because I think that I'm the stake holder here and I take THAT as the true chain.  How are we going to find out now what is the true chain ?

In your chain, you think you have the stake to sign that I lost the discussion, and in my chain, I think that I have the stake to sign that you lost the discussion.  How are we going to differentiate between my statement that you didn't get the point, and your statement that I didn't get the point ?   Is just stating so sufficient ?  Visibly not.

But, again.  If you have users and miners agreeing on set of rules A on one hand, and on the other hand a vast majority of full non-mining nodes agreeing (only) on rules B, then, the chain that is going to "work" is the chain with rules A, and B will get you nowhere.  As such, those full nodes, in agreement amongst themselves in majority, but in disagreement with users and miners, CANNOT GUARD the network from adopting rules A.

Really ?  Again, I challenge you to start up 100 000 bitcoin nodes on amazon using different rules, and see how much you can make the bitcoin network comply to your modifications (if you consider your modifications the actual rules you want to  "guard"), against the will of the users and the miners, which will show you the "power" of a non-mining full node majority.

Do you really think you will impose your rules by just firing up 100 000 bitcoin nodes ?

But then the "authority" is the software writer, no ?  Why doesn't that software writer, who has visibly authority on the "check points" to write them in the code or not, keep the whole block chain and does all the signing off of the blocks ?  Then there's no reason to even do PoS.  The software writer can then be the central authority that has the "block chain" on his web site.
I'm talking about the hard-coded check points IN THE CODE other than the check on the genesis block here.

In the case of check points GENERATED by the wallet, there is a fundamental problem with wallet-generated "check points", in the following sense: in the case they are valid, they are useless, and in the case they are useful, they don't exist.  Let me explain. 

If you have a running wallet for a long time, you can of course regularly make BACKUPS of the block chain.  Now, it can be strange that suddenly, the block chain is re-written since 2 years ago.  You clearly see that there's something fishy.  Imagine a new bitcoin block chain being propagated which is totally different since 2014, even if it has more PoW than the one you have, you know there's something fishy.  *but that is because you already were running in 2014 !*  So only wallets running since 2014 can actually SEE that things were changed after the fact.  You can see your "backup" of your wallet of 2015 as a "check point".   Sure.

The point, however, is to a newcomer, he cannot know.  He simply sees a block chain, and another one, which diverge since 2014.  One (the modified one) has more PoW than the other one.   If I have to GENERATE ancient check points for both chains, I can of course, but they will not learn me anything.  Each chain, by itself, will give rise to perfectly valid but different check points in the past.

So what's left ?  Wel, the hard-coded check points in the code.  But imagine now that there are different wallets from different devs that one can download.  Some wallets have the hard-coded check point of the first chain, other wallets of the second chain.  Depending on the wallet I decide to install, I will accept one chain or the other.  On the authority of the programmer of the wallet.  And we're back to square one.

PoS needs checkpoints, because it is inherently "free of stake", or almost so.  In fact, there is a small, unwanted PoW stake to faking PoS.  It goes as follows:

Suppose that I possess 20% of all coins in a PoS coin.  Now, at a certain point, I make a transaction of 15% of my holdings, and I buy a luxury ship with it.  Of course, once this transaction is signed into a block, I only have 5% of stake any more.  But for blocks BEFORE that transaction, I have 20% of PoS. 

I can hence sign blocks NOT containing my transaction from a point before that transaction, using the normal PoS mechanism, in competition with the actual chain.   The problem is of course, that I only have 20% chance to sign a block.  So on average 4 out of 5 blocks cannot be signed by me.  At least, if the pseudo-random function works well, and assigns me as a signer 1 out of 5 times.   However, that pseudo-random function depends on the content of the signed blocks in many cases.  So I can apply a kind of PoW to change those blocks (including or excluding other people's transactions) until that block happens to generate ME again as the signee.  I have, on average, to try 5 different blocks to do so, if I have a stake of 20%.  So I need to perform about 5 times the normal work of others to sign off the entire rest of the chain, because "by coincidence" I'm always an allowed signee in the PoS lottery.

You seem to have a problem in argumenting. 



"if all businesses disagree with the evil miners" is not a case I'm discussing.  I'm discussing the case where miners and users AGREE to change the rules, but ONLY a vast majority of non-mining full nodes don't and want to be "guardian of the protocol".




The argument of authority has no value.  It is not because "bitcoin experts" tell you something, that it has to be that way.  What those "bitcoin experts" are writing is perfectly true, under assumptions that I don't make, namely that there is a symbiosis between mining, nodes and users.  I make the explicit, and rather artificial hypothesis that non-mining full nodes are NOT agreeing with the consensus between users and miners.  As this is not the hypothesis that your bitcoin experts make, what they say is not relevant to my gedanken experiment.

We are also perfectly in agreement, but you are not just a "full node runner", but a "disgruntled user".  And you perfectly illustrate what I wanted to say: you're running of a full node hasn't stopped "the bad guys" (that is to say, the miners who decided upon a change of rule and who have the large majority of mining power attached to THEIR full nodes).  It has just INFORMED you that the block chain that is mainly being mined doesn't correspond to the rules you want.  As such, you stop USING it, your node comes essentially to a grinding halt, and you not using it any more removes market cap from the coin.  But you didn't stop anything.

In my case, I'm running a full node at home.  But it has an empty wallet.  I am a bitcoin user only for buying some bitcoin to spend them on some goods, I don't weight much on the market cap.  The day that the large majority consortium of miners decide upon a change of rules (and become "the bad guys") and implement those new rules in THEIR miner pool full nodes (in other words, the day that the "bad guys" decide on a hard fork), and I don't upgrade, because I am a "guardian of the immutability of the rules" with my empty full node, my full node will simply stop accepting blocks, *and that's it*.  Even if I had 100 000 such full nodes running, they would also simply stop accepting the forked chain, and come to a halt.  All users connected to those nodes would be informed that the blocks don't come any more.  In as much as they'd agree with the "bad guys fork", they'd have to connect directly to the few of their mining nodes.   And that's it.


This is the error in the reasoning here, of course.  If essentially all miners are the "evil ones" and they have an agreement with most of the users, then you can wait forever for these "miners to be overcome".   In other words, if the miners decide upon a hard fork, and hence become "evil miners" according to the above, no matter how many full nodes are refusing this hard fork, it won't change anything.


This is also wrong.  It is not because *full nodes* wouldn't be in agreement, but because USERS wouldn't be in agreement.  If users are in agreement with the hard fork, then the "disgruntled full nodes" don't matter.  That's my point.  The users will connect to the few full nodes that implement the hard fork and continue to use the coin ; the miners have agreed upon the hard fork too.  And whether there are now 100 000 full nodes that stop accepting that chain, doesn't matter.   The block chain is still mined by the miners, the users are still using it and maintaining the market cap, and the disgruntled "guardian nodes" simply stop working as they don't see a block chain that they accept as valid and which isn't produced.

But, as I said, this is an artificial situation.  In most cases, only users run full nodes.  So in as much as users agree with the hard fork, they UPDATE their full nodes.  And in as much as users do not agree with the hard fork, miners will not attempt to implement it as it will hurt market cap.

So in practice, most full nodes will be in agreement with the rules, even if those rules are forked, or not.

You seem to be rather deaf, because you have a hard time imagining that someone is interested in crypto, visibly.  I don't trade, I don't hold a lot of coins, I only buy coins when I want to use them (that is, spend them on something).  I think it is bad for crypto to "invest" in it: money is not an "investment" but an intermediate good in a commercial exchange.  So there's no dumping to be done if there's no "investment" of course.  My idea of going to an exchange is to buy coins I'll use.  The idea is not to go in the other direction (that is, to sell coins).  If one day I get paid a lot in coins for a thing I do, then it might be necessary to go to an exchange to get some fiat out of it if that's too many coins I can spend on stuff (that is, if there's not enough stuff available to be bought in bitcoin or monero).    THAT, to me, is the use of crypto.

I'm very sad that the price of crypto today is so high, and I'm pretty sad that monero rose to over $10.  When it was about $1, it is true that the market cap was too low because some serious deals in monero would be a significant fraction of the market cap.   But when dark market acceptance was there, my hope was that it would rise to, say, $4.  That would have been enough market cap.   Unfortunately, now, speculators and "investors" like you have fallen onto it, and now the price is almost as ridiculously blown up as bitcoin's.  Bitcoin should be around $40 or something.  That's enough for the actual usage as I spelled out above.  All this stupid gambling, investing, and trading has killed crypto entirely in the above view.  But I keep to it.  I'm not interested in crypto for anything else than its usage as a currency, because anything else is not sustainable.   It can take a long time before that bubble pops, but it will pop, because it is a greater fool game.

So yes, for the few crypto coins I need, I'm obliged to go to a "complying exchange".  Now, with a coin like monero, at least, once I bought them, they can't know what I do with it.  But that's even hypothetical, because for the moment, I don't buy any monero, as I can't spend them.  If I want to buy a computer, or toner for my printer, or whatever, it is way easier to do it with fiat ; the offers on openbazaar are still meager as compared to amazon, and you have to use bitcoin there.


Of course not, why would I do that.   I'm asking people to stop trading and "investing".  I would like the price of crypto to go down, so that the greater-fool game it is now in, would stop.  I would like the market cap of crypto to be mainly supported by its usage through Fisher's formula, like the price of fiat is, instead of being "supported" by the hope to find greater fools, that has to stop one day.   It would be great if I woke up tomorrow, and bitcoin was at $80,-, and monero at $2,-.  Then I'd know that this silly game is over, and that crypto is back where it should be: as a currency for a parallel economy.

I say this, not because I'm a kind of monk preaching the good word, but because the current game has no sustainable future.  Complying crypto is silly, fiat is better because it hasn't that burden of trustlessness and decentralisation.  And "investing" in it is nothing else but a greater fool game, of which we all know what happens when one runs out of greater fools.

Now, it is true that there's still 90% of the planet of greater fools available, so if you play it smart, you can win a lot before it crashes, but that's immoral I think.  And risky too, because you could hit the wall much sooner than you think and you might be that greater fool all your peers have been waiting for.