“I'm aware of the 21 million maximum BTC cap”
Better thought of as a configuration value set by people with most of the mining power, which last time I checked was PRC
Better thought of as a configuration value set by people with most of the mining power, which last time I checked was PRC
These splits have already happened multiple times (Bitcoin Gold, SV, ABC, Cash) and most claim to be "the real Bitcoin". They are all either dead or valued <1/100 of BTC.
Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to?
The owners of Bitcoin would just fork and switch to a different algorithm, ruining the value of existing mining hardware.
Please learn how the Nakamoto Consensus works and how nodes protect the Bitcoin network while miners are slaves to the network. There's a rich history of this being tested by adversaries.
The practical problem is that users have to download the entire dataset. There are a lot of queries that cannot be done exclusively through an index and require downloading a substantial amount of data. Bitcoin (and any decentralized app) is exactly the same. It's just that they replaced the central server with a proof of work consensus mechanism that makes it truly decentralized.
It's not a practical user experience. Lightning is just a fancy federated paypal. The average user won't care once Paypal and Mastercard support Bitcoin. The inability to scale causes Bitcoin to give more power to established financial institutions. It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.
Not ironic at all. Bitcoin is supposed to be a robust, decentralised, censorship resistant settlement layer. That's literally the point. It's the base protocol.
We don't, after all, expect users to care about TCP/IP whenever they post to TikTok.
But it's reasonable, based on current trends, to predict that the number of full nodes will continue to increase all over the world.
If they don't follow the rules as set by the users of the system, their blocks will be automatically ignored by the users software [1] (while users receive blocks from miners following their rules).
[1]: there is one CONDITION to that, and that is that an economic majority of users either do run real bitcoin nodes (can also be light clients on smartphones that connect to own node at home or to external servers that do not belong to miners) or that the services they use do run real bitcoin nodes (and do not collude with miners).
It is about an economic majority of users, and not about a simple majority. There are higher chances that users with more value invested, will run their own nodes, and therefore will not be tricked by malicious miners, and therefore increase the value of the blockchain where the rules are followed (if the forked blockchain with infinite or increase supply were to have some traction by an economic minority, the economic majority could run a second node with these changed rules and sell their coins on that chain, that would make the chain the loosing chain, like what happened with "Bitcoin-cash").
Obviously everyone running their own node would be best, so that those nodes are not run by a small amount of entities who could decide to run software/nodes that do follow their own rules. That is *WHY* bitcoiners are sooo much against raising the blocksize limit, so that running a node is not too resource intensive, so that the number of people running their own nodes (knowingly or even better unknowingly) is as big as possible. Many do think that bitcoin is slow for technical reasons. That is not the case (and lightning could increase the throughput a lot if it achieves it's goal one day). Bitcoin wants to be "slow" to make it easy for as much users as possible to run a node (read: having a maximum amount of users (knowingly and unknowingly) run real nodes, instead of SPV-wallets that do NOT validates the rules and therefore can be tricked by miners!)
By running your own node, you mainly protect yourself, but a tiny bit also the rest of the users (long term aligned incentives, once running a node is computational irrelevant, or one node per family runing on the home router or similar).
That being said, miners, developers, exchanges, ... all can influence what happens, but the biggest power lies in users hands... if the economical majority run (archival or pruned) fully validating nodes.
miners are timestamping machines, which main function is to order (!) the transactions. That's it!
The is the whole point, everyone/every node verifies the rules, but the network has to agree on some ordering, as they could be many possibilities to order the transaction, and the network wouldn't know who to listen (everyone has his own opinion about the best ordering). So the "lucky miner" extends the blockchain effectively ordering the new transactions.
If the miner increases the supply or doesn't follow any other consensus rule, other nodes won't accept it. So the miner has not much power. He orders transactions