contentious Miner Activated Hard Fork - MAHF
less than palatable User Activated Soft Fork- UASF is less dangerous
I'm honestly tired of reading this Orwellian nonsense. Bitcoin was clearly designed with miners controlling the protocol and forks in mind. Instead of speaking the truth, that there's supposed to be such a large amount of individually acting miners that it's not possible for them all to collude forming a nash equilibrium, and that only win-win policies would be adopted in a non-zero game game, you instead have a failure of bitcoin decentralization where everyone who controls the entire coin can fit into one car.
ASICs and pools destroyed how bitcoin is supposed to function. It essentially died at that point and people just pretended it didn't ever since and now it's the Chinese Paypal. This doesn't mean "full nodes" now control bitcoin just because you don't want one car full of Chinamen to control it. That's not how it works. Miners will always control it or it's not actually bitcoin. The fact is, there was a breakdown in the decentralization and Nash equilibrium of bitcoin that has to be addressed.
Decentralization may even be an insoluble problem itself, making this thing a giant fugazi no matter what you do. I tend to believe that is the case until someone can prove me wrong. I imagine it would take something extreme like some cutting edge cryptography to let you create decentralized captchas for mining so that it takes active user input to solve blocks - human based mining. Using energy expenditure to find convergence was never that great of an idea in the first place when energy costs are not even close to uniform across the globe. It was designed to centralize even without ASICs.
Why do you think I like metals? Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme created by *some guy. Gold and silver are a Ponzi scheme created by *God.
hashing power and node count is only a signal of the truth underlining
Very much Decentralized consensus.
a super-majority hashrate Fork ( hard or soft ) can fail
a User Activated Fork can fail
the reality of the situation is if there is sizable demand for not consenting to a fork of any kind
a split will occur, and all exchanges will be economically incentivized ( through trading fees ) to say impartial (somthing they seem to want to do naturally anyway ) and allow for the 2 competing forks to trade ( ex. BTCCore Vs BTCBU )
when we fork with a majority hashrate and node count, we can safely assume, economic majority is on our side and such a "split + market battle" is unlikely, but we are simply assuming node count + hashrate is indicative of the economic majority's will.
its a fairly safe assumption since miners are economically incentives to align with economic majority.
bottom line is, bitcoin necessarily is what WE think it is, its not about the miners its not even about the users, when push comes to shove money talks.
it goes without saying a split is not what anyone wants.
But it isn't well understood how a small minority disapproving the change is irrelevant.
we are currently at an impasse with the blocksize debate because as of yet there isnt even a rought conusues, and no one wants to risk spliting the chain.
this will end 1 of 3 ways
1) we finally do get a super majority rallying behind a solution, in which case the minority opposed to the change can easily be crushed.
2) we split the chain, in which case its unclear if one side can ever really call themselves "bitcoin" ever again.
3) we do nothing forever, in which case altcoins become more relevant
Poll
