Yes this is one of the things that Satoshi got wrong. "1 CPU = 1 vote" is wrong. Turns out that Proof-of-Work is unrelated to the physical quantity of CPUs, rather it's more about computation and hashrate. Also it's a stretch to call Proof-of-Work a vote ..... it's not an election, it's more like a random lottery or something.
> it's not an election, it's more like a random lottery or something.
A random lottery where your odds of winning directly correlate with your CPU power / hashrate. The more you win the more influence you have over the state of the network. Comparing it to a vote is a reasonable analogy.
> ISM is used for soft-fork upgrades, which do not change existing consensus rules.
"Soft-forks" do change existing consensus rules. Will a miner's v1 blocks be accepted by the majority of the network today?
> Block size is not a parameter you can force on upgraded nodes by soft-fork.
Isn't this what the Segregated Witness proposal[1] effectively does? The new limit proposed would be 4MB with an expected confirmed transaction throughput increase on the order of 2x.
To quote Pieter:
"Another way of looking at it, is that we raise the block size to 4 MB for the witness part, but the non-witness has same size."
[1] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/s...
"The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - Nakamoto