The ONLY power that miners have..

[hazek]

is to self-destruct their own capital.

This post is inspired by Brother Jon's latest video where it's obvious to me way too many people still don't get how Bitcoin works.


The real power of control over what is Bitcoin and how it works does not lie with miners. The real power over and autonomy in Bitcoin lies with EVERY FULL NODE (maybe even some SPV nodes) that check and relay new transactions and check new blocks for whether or not they follow the rules. It is these nodes that decide how Bitcoin works.

IF miners go their separate way and the vast majority of full nodes disagree the only thing that miners can possibly achieve is self-destruct their capital by self-destructing Bitcoin. That's it, that's all they can do. Why? Because no matter what new rules* they start to validate new transactions and blocks by, they can't force full nodes to accept those same rules. Period. And if full nodes don't follow in their direction it would mean a hard fork and possibly grave consequences for the confidence in Bitcoin i.e. it's destruction (at the very least severe damage).




Now can we put this topic to rest already and focus on more important stuff like scalability and the blocksize limit which still isn't solved and yet IS an actual major problem?


*here I mean rules that would require a hard fork, the above is not true for soft fork rule changes, i.e. for new rules that make the current rules stricter

[LevLion]

Fair enough. I believe mining is either a professional huge enterprise or a very interesting and fun hobby. Either or, the decentralisation of the money supply its whats truly game-changing.

[ElectricMucus]

It doesn't matter if you don't call it bitcoin, if it is possible to make transactions it's a currency.

Too bad if bitcoin were to lose that ability. What happens when miners leave in a rush is what you saw with namecoin back before the merge.
Only this time you need an asic to even make those baby steps to the next adjustment during your lifetime.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It doesn't matter if you don't call it bitcoin, if it is possible to make transactions it's a currency.

Too bad if bitcoin were to lose that ability. What happens when miners leave in a rush is what you saw with namecoin back before the merge.
Only this time you need an asic to even make those baby steps to the next adjustment during your lifetime.

You speak of miners as if they are a single borg-like entity.  If some miners abandon ship to a unprofitable doomed fork then the miners which remain will reap larger profits.  If enough miners leave them it will leave a vacuum and new miners will deploy hardware into the gap.

While it is true Bitcoin difficulty lags hashing power under most scenarios it is a non-issue.  The time between difficulty adjustments is 2016 blocks or ~14 days under normal conditions.  Say 50% of miners leave right after a difficulty adjustment (worst possible time) then the next difficulty adjustment takes one month.  Transacitons take twice as long, it is annoying but hardly earth shattering and in a month the network adjusts.

Lets take an even more unrealistic scenario where 75% of miners leave (once again right after difficulty change) it will take about two months to adjust and network will be back to normal.

Sure if 99% of miners left it would cripple the network but miners are highly fragmented the idea that 99% of miners would agree to anything is laughable. 

[ElectricMucus]

True Miners aren't a borg-like entity, but nodes aren't either and how I see it hazek is saying here that it wouldn't be an issue if they were. (a borg like entity)

ASICs are a bitter-sweet pill in that regard, on one hand it is now certain that miners can't be made to leave like it was possible with gpus where some potentially immensely more profitable venture could lure them all away, it would have to be SHA-2. On the other hand the level of centralization of hashing power becomes more of an issue.

[vintagetrex]

I totally agree and thats the way it should be with bitcoin.  However, there is this one system that has 3 mining networks, making it capable of 3 party voting.