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Comment by evolve2k | Hacker News Reader

I was vaguely aware that bitcoin was open source but not aware the code base was open for change and potential pull requests? Excuse my naivity but wasn't part if the design that the algorithm and everything was locked in upfront and not open to change? How is a new feature approved and merged into master?

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Changing the code, creating pull request, and doing all of that is easy. The hard part is convincing users and miners to upgrade, especially with something that is protocol breaking.

Effectively the major mining pools control bitcoin since they determine what is likely to get accepted. Note that the devs had to ask the minners to down grade.

The funny thing is if several large banks decided they wanted to open minning pools, i'd imagine they could do so and then control all kinds of things. I wonder if this will happen (or if it already has. How many miners operate over Tor? )

Miners do not control the rules, they merely choose to accept or not accept them. That's a very important distinction that is a part of the checks and balances system in Bitcoin.

What would happen if all the miners got together and demanded a code change that benefited miners, like perhaps increase the mining reward? Assuming the devs disagreed with the change, would the BTC community have any way to prevent this alliance of miners from updating the code themselves, deploying it everywhere, and using their overwhelming mining power to maintain the longest block chain and thereby making the code change a reality?

How would miners demand? They can't say "do it or we'll stop mining", there will be plenty of competition out there willing to take their job. As for deploying the code themselves - it's not like you can deploy it and force people to use it, every individual user decides which client or version of a client to use voluntarily. They would have to convince people to switch to their fork.

Having the longest block chain doesn't matter if the transactions in your block chain violate the validation rules of the people doing business.

That depends on the kind of change. There is actually a list of changes that are of high impact to the network and block chain but may be implemented nevertheless

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

Of course, none of these are major economic changes. To quote the article "Please don't list anything here which would significantly change the committed overall economics of the system, it's safe to assume anything with significant economic impact will _never_ be changed in Bitcoin, because such changes would undermine the trust people have in the system, though they may form the basis of an interesting alternative chain.".

A recent example of a change that affects the P2P network, but not the block chain, is the use of bloom filters to make more efficient (but still secure) light clients possible.

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