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Comment by maaku | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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