If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now.
There's no telling whether it'd be the "hijacked" branch or the original one - assuming they control 50%+ of the mining power, there's a decent argument that the remaining miners would follow their lead if only to stay on the largest branch.
Usually forks have checkpoints as well so things can't change willy-nilly.
There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin.
If everyone would run new implementations with a different coin cap, you can argue that it is no longer Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a very specific specification with a 21M coin cap, but this would have little bearing on the actual situation.
Yes, these 100 miners are pools. But where pool participants will go then? Will pools who have not forked keep pool participation fees low?
Etc.
The game here is not quite simple. It is much more complex than appears at first sight.
Here’s a graph of the time blocks took over the last three years:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-confirmationtim...
Look at the peaks and try to remember the issues that resulted in.
Second, instead of two weeks to hash rate adjustment, it will take four weeks.
And if these staying with this slow bitcoin would decide to leave to more profitable currencies (not necessarily Bitcoin, there are other SHA256-based PoW schemes), that will push hash rate adjustment even further into future.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/03/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-dr...
We survived.
Money has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services.
Bitcoin has worth because people accept it in exchange for goods and services.
It’s not the miners that create value, it’s the merchants. If miners start some fork they’ll leave the main blockchain, which will run fine without them. And they have absolutely no way of forcing anyone to use their fork. Only if the merchants start accepting coins from the forked blockchain will it become valuable. But that’s up to the merchants, not the miners.
There are problems with one miner controlling over 50% of the mining power. This is not such a problem.
It's been quite educational watching the whole cryptocurrency community re-invent economics 101 and find out the problem has never been technical, always been political.
This is less a criticism towards you @CompuHacker and more about how ill-informed reporters are (especially it's most vocal critics) about Bitcoin's history.
We already went through this during the USAF/Segwit war that went on for far too long if you were there and delayed so many other key features that we are only now catching up to. With the added caveat that Roger Veer (a VERY ignorant whale with influencer status) and Jihan (CEO at the time of Bitmain with a monopoly on ASIC miners and large hashing power on the network) decided to hi-jack Bitcoin for their own ends. There were other whales/high net worth entities, including Coinbase, but lets keep it simple for arguments sake.
In short, it didn't work and no one uses/used their fork (Bcash) because the end result was that Bitcoin's mainchain and it's features was valued far more than what whales and hashing power/devices. Furthermore, upon the fork people arbitraged the coin and dumped it in exchange for Bitcoin and Bcash has never recovered since. Showing that playing by the rules has it's incentives and is rewarded: rewarding consensus is one of Bitcoin's core features, and I wish more people would realize this is the ecosystem is far more conducive toward progress than abject discord.
What's even more amusing is that a core developer of Bitcoin Core decided to help patch some of Bcash's source code, showing that what you fear has actually already played out and proved why Bitcoin has already proven itself and has a the battle scars to prove it.
It's remarkable what has happened in this space in the last 12 years, and in my ideal World I think their would be more time spent on that and what it has taught us via empirical experimentation rather than just the price.
Sidenote: It's why the plot of the 51% attack on the series Silicon Valley only made sense to people who really have no idea how the network attack would actually play out on decentralized networks.