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Comment by anopows | Hacker News Reader

How do you define user support?

All the definitions I heard are able to be manipulated easily:

-The/r/bitcoin consensus? Is mainly in existence because of censorship

-User wallets online? Can be easily created with AWS instances

-Bitcoin core? Who decides these bunch of people are in charge to represent all users and not a bunch of other developers?

One obvious alternative is to let Bitcoin follow economic incentives: Bitcoin miners gain Bitcoin, so they have a vested interest that their income is and stays valuable. Thus why not let the miners decide. This is also the only place where you can't influence/manipulate Bitcoin easily.

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User support is really easily measured in the event of a split and really hard to measure before the split.

Quite simply, the coin price indicates support. After the split, there will be two versions of the Bitcoin network with independent prices. A non zero price indicates non-zero support, and as long as it's at least 25% of the original price, it'll probably be okay.

A high price indicates high support.

In the long term, the hashrate follows the price. Miners will mine the coin with the highest price, because they can't afford any other option. Electricity is expensive.

So you say mining of Bitcoin only follows the market value?

Isn't it at least to a large degree the other way round? That market value is following based on what is the most mined chain? If there's a split and 80% of mining power switches to one branch. Then the 20% branch loses a lot of utility for at least some time. It now has five times slower transactions until difficulty gets adjusted(or you change the proof of work of bitcoin, which itself can be precarious). And now to a minor degree the minority chain has also less safety (less hashing power).

Meanwhile why should anyone buy or send Bitcoins at the point of a split? There's a real chance that one branch will die and then you can lose the coins. The best strategy is probably to wait. So the market at least is in some way inhibited during a split.

On the other hand I'd argue miners of the minority chain have a lot of pressure to change branches. Market is not yet a good indicator only hashing power and they'll lose money if they don't continue to mine on the more profitable chain. Their safest bet is to change chains. Also they know that other miners of the minority chain think probably similarly. That's why imo in Bitcoin history every fork/split was resolved very quickly and a branch "won".

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