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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to the protocol, there's no decentralization.

BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.

I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality.

You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.

> You can’t [...] update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography

Have you reviewed any of the proposals to do exactly that? https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/quantum-resistance/

It helps build a new system, but all existing wallets would be hackable until they migrate. And we expect everyone to have the time and resources to do that? For a “store of value” system?

All of my hardware wallets are now worthless? All of the hardware security modules used for wallets managed by corporations no longer work?

It's an absolute mess for so many reasons that a "protocol fix" just doesn't cover.

> all existing wallets would be hackable until they migrate

Not necessarily. See "Discussion of Guy Fawkes signatures to protect some current bitcoins against quantum theft" and "Commit/reveal function for post-quantum recovery of insecure bitcoins" sections of the Optech page.

Isn’t that exactly how it works?

You agree on a post-quantum algorithm…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Then you update the protocol…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/qth9ii/how_does_bi...

Right?

How would you protect all the old stuck or stale BTC wallets that used the original crypto? An awful lot of cold-stored or presumed-lost BTC would be hard or impossible to migrate to post-quantum protection, no? A quarter of mined BTC? Half?

More of an economic than technical puzzle these days. But wouldn't you need users to protect their wallets post-fork?

You tell people that value their bitcoin to migrate to new wallets. Bitcoin is self sovereignty and self-ownership. You are responsible for securing your own wallet.

The bitcoin that has been lost doesn't matter, because it's lost. That becomes fair game to whoever can find the computational resources to crack the cryptography of the wallets to get to it. At that point BTC will probably be $500k-$1M in price, and it might just be the driving force behind mainstream adoption of quantum computing.

A forced migration is basically just making a brand new system. It’s not a “protocol fix”.

You… can.

Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen

Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes

They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit

If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win!

This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.

And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.

Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now.

There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.

See also, the DAO hack.

Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get forking.

What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no transactions reversed. The miners just got together and started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain, and eventually the new chain had more work done and was validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify signature for this particular transaction". This blot will stay in the protocol for ever.

Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power.

For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1].

[1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat

Bitcoin can be forked, and in fact has been. You didn't mention mining centralization, which is another avenue.

One of the biggest points of failure I can see happening is self hosted node packaged software services like umbrel. Where they are just updating your node for you.

Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization implies consent.

Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance" projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other 49% have no recourse but to leave.

with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute rather than 51% of the token?

Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership" in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the most invested in the outcome of the project.

Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can already redefine “Bitcoin” to be whatever they want… At any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough as a bloc)

So this seems like a pointless distinction.

51% hashing power doesn’t prevent forks. Including forks to 51% of the token systems.

That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.

That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules, arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).

Why can’t such a bloc for example rename Bitcoin to Buttcoin?

Anyone can do that, it doesn't require 51% of the hash power. And it's already been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times (the more technical term for them is "shitcoin").

No, that's completely different thing. Mining power only "decides" about the blocks in the blockchain. 51% is only relevant in the context of taking over the blockchain by 51% attack.

Software versions and updates require social / economic consensus and have nothing to do with mining power. Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone can use whichever version they like. But there's also economic incentives to use the most used version and to make sure that it will keep being the most used version, i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's in everyone's interest to reach consensus.

So there are two different places that a coup against bitcoin could occur? Processing and Software.

With something like 45% of processing controlled by entities in Iran, China, and Russia, it seems like an absolute fools game to put any significant wealth in Bitcoin. All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype.

You couldn't pay me to hold a Bitcoin.

It's the same as any currency. If the place you want to spend it only accepts currency y then you must trade for currency y to spend money there.

Since Bitcoin is software anyone can fork it and create a currency y with the same ledger up to the fork but few people do because convincing other people to trade for it without a very strong argument is hard.

What do you think "Iran" can do if they controlled 51% of processing power?

Double spend any bitcoins in their possession?

Or just announce and prove that they are doing it, thereby causing a run on bitcoin and all the other bozobucks.

> All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype.

As opposed to any other modern financial system with significant liquidity in digital assets?

I fail to see how substantial private ownership distributed amongst those countries makes it significantly vulnerable.

Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a technological innovation, but more of a governance innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person) being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what can I do?"

I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many participants - possibly because the enormous negative externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people.

(Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)

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