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Comment by rufusroflpunch | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but this demonstrates a lack of knowledge about Bitcoin’s history and nature. All of these things have been tried and failed. The core devs and the miners don’t control Bitcoin. The full nodes control Bitcoin. The only way to successfully fork Bitcoin is to convince all of the nodes to run the code.

Other cryptocurrencies get around this by being more centralized. This includes Ethereum. These other blockchains make it significantly more difficult and costly to run nodes, which means fewer nodes run, mostly by large corporations so that they can exert control and fork the chains all the time.

Bitcoin is different. Anyone can run a node on an old laptop. There are tens of thousand of public nodes worldwide, who knows how many private ones. If miners ran a fork to change consensus rules, the nodes would just reject the blocks and the miners just waste electricity.

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I don't speak for HN, but why do bitcoin proponents always assume people to be ignorant on a website with some of the smartest people on the planet? I've never got this, and never will.

No offense, but it's the most incurious form of argument on a website dedicated to curiosity.

I don't think your original comment was curious but had a snarky tone and demonstrated a lack of knowledge about the history of Bitcoin and what has been tried. As GP pointed out, it's not as simple as miners choosing to follow a different consensus algorithm or block size because you also need to convince the rest of the network (or 51% of it at least) to follow these new rules. Immense amount of effort is put into Bitcoin improvement proposals to make changes to the network while keeping the protocol compatible with older versions of it.

I think your own ignorance of Bitcoin's history is showing. Centralized decision-making saved Bitcoin.

"On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two.

The optimal course of action (and, in retrospect, the only one that avoided serious risks to the system) was first proposed and justified 16 minutes later, and the developers reached consensus on it a mere 20–25 minutes after that. Shortly thereafter — barely an hour after the discovery of the fork — the crisis response had effectively and successfully concluded.

Without the central co-ordination of the Bitcoin Core developers and the strong trust that the community places in them, it is inconceivable that adopting this counterintuitive solution could have been successfully accomplished."

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

I think there is a major difference between consensus-breaking bug which unites the community in adopting a new change and a BIP which proposes a change to the network and modifies the consensus rules. But I fully agree with you that it is possible to reach a consensus about some change to the protocol but as the network grows it becomes harder and harder.

Secondly, this is 9 years ago and the Bitcoin network has grown quite a bit since then, meaning back then it was quite a bit smaller undertaking in getting the majority of the network to adapt the bug fix than it would be today. The core developers are also very paranoid about introducing these bugs which you can see for yourself by browsing the open PRs and verifying that anything that even remotely touches the consensus code is very heavily scrutinized.

I think the only thing that matters is the miners. If the miners decide they want a change (like more total BTC to mine, or more BTC per transaction, or removing the difficulty halving) they'll fork it themselves and force everyone to move with them.

"Really nice bitcoins you have there, it would be a shame if a anyone did a 51% attack on them."

> but why do bitcoin proponents always assume people to be ignorant on a website with some of the smartest people on the planet?

Uh... because your comment is just straight up wrong?

For instance, miners don't have a vote or a say at all, unlike proof of stake systems. If a miner changes the consensus algorithm, that is forking bitcoin, but bitcoin itself goes on unchanged.

I was thinking the "smartest people on the planet" bit was at least misleading if not entirely wrong.

Of any significantly large site there will be a distribution of people for whatever reasons.

Who is to say who is "the smartest" ?

Your romantic view of this site is unfounded. At least the comment you complain about had an argument you can respond to. All you've done is tersely generalize.

I wish HN was a “website with some of the smartest people on the planet” where some meant >1%. It's clearly not.

Perhaps people from the industry so people that share lingo, but most people here are definitely not “smart”.

As an historical analysis this seems about right. History is not what will determine who controls a multi-party system, however. Those miners need the full nodes, and the full nodes need the miners. BC users (buyer, sellers, transactors) need both, and both miners and full nodes are worthless without a strong user base. Since there is no centralized, legally or regulatorily established governance mechanism for the whole, who controls BC will be determined by game theory applied to the real circumstances of the various stakeholder groups, and how they behave as groups. I don't know how that turns out, but it is not hard to imagine a scenario where, with mining concentrated in a small number of powerful players' hands, they can have enough authority to change the rules of the game.

And that still leaves out the possibility that regulators get involved and exert their authority to change the rules - which may be the most likely outcome of all.

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