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Comment by dontbelieveyou | Hacker News Reader

> The nature of Nakamoto consensus is such that consensus parameters are not up to vote

"The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - Nakamoto

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> "Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - Nakamoto

Yes this is one of the things that Satoshi got wrong. "1 CPU = 1 vote" is wrong. Turns out that Proof-of-Work is unrelated to the physical quantity of CPUs, rather it's more about computation and hashrate. Also it's a stretch to call Proof-of-Work a vote ..... it's not an election, it's more like a random lottery or something.

He stated PoW was _essentially_ one-CPU-one-vote. It's clear that the intent is to mean hashrate, or CPU power as he phrases it multiple times in the same paper.

> it's not an election, it's more like a random lottery or something.

A random lottery where your odds of winning directly correlate with your CPU power / hashrate. The more you win the more influence you have over the state of the network. Comparing it to a vote is a reasonable analogy.

Not over the consensus parameters. You could have infinite hash power, but if your blocks are invalid they will be ignored.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/be9a9a3d2253ceccf123...

Um, I'm not sure why you are pointing to that? ISM is used for soft-fork upgrades, which do not revert existing consensus rules. You can have a ISM vote over a new block size, but old clients will still reject the bigger blocks.

The upgrades are triggered by a super-majority of blocks of a certain version. This version maps to a possible new consensus rule. Block creation is a product of computational work. Therefore there is a precedent for CPUs/ASICs voting on the consensus rules of the system.

> ISM is used for soft-fork upgrades, which do not change existing consensus rules.

"Soft-forks" do change existing consensus rules. Will a miner's v1 blocks be accepted by the majority of the network today?

Which has no relevance to this conversation about BU and block size. Block size is not a parameter you can force on upgraded nodes by soft-fork.

You made the claim that under "Nakamoto consensus" the consensus parameters are not up for a vote. A correction seemed warranted.

> Block size is not a parameter you can force on upgraded nodes by soft-fork.

Isn't this what the Segregated Witness proposal[1] effectively does? The new limit proposed would be 4MB with an expected confirmed transaction throughput increase on the order of 2x.

To quote Pieter:

"Another way of looking at it, is that we raise the block size to 4 MB for the witness part, but the non-witness has same size."

[1] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/s...

"If"

And if they are not?

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