I keep seeing this idea invoked over and over again, and it's starting to bug me. The problem with this idea is that it conflates technical decentralization and the spirit or ideals of decentralization. The latter can be betrayed or degraded even while the former is preserved. Just because the miners aren't compelled by the network architecture to implement a fork doesn't mean that there aren't social dynamics which have the effect of centralizing decisions made by those miners. "Consensus" doesn't have any inherent value or rightness. Consensus is just a majority of a group electing to do something. In the world of the decentralized web, consensus is positive only when network nodes are truly acting autonomously. It's best when this means that each node acts in self-interest, without regard for or in ignorance of the interests or positions of the other nodes. This is not what's happening on the Ethereum network. There's a huge amount of coordination. Ethereum is a network that hasn't individuated itself from a relatively small group of creators/maintainers/community members. As long as the network depends on these people for strength and stability, the miners will be biased to carry out the wishes of those people. Otherwise the miners risk losing whatever value they've accrued through their work. So yes, the fork only happens through a consensus of the miners. But it hasn't been established that the miners are capable of independent action.

But what's your point? Ethereum is not decentralised because... there are social dynamics? What do you want to do about it? The protocol is decentralised, the technology is completely agnostic to anything but the will of the majority. Of course there will be social dynamics and people will discuss things and read things and coordinate and influence one another. That does not invalidate the whole thing.

Suppose for a minute the miners and the software developers disagreed strongly on some important decision. What do you think would happen?

* Would the software developers suck it up and follow the miners?

* Would the pool of software developers shrink because various developers do not find implementing the will of the miners to be an enjoyable hobby and/or job anymore?

* Would the miners hire new software developers to replace the ones that leave?

* Would there be a fork?

I don't know, but pretending that "the protocol is decentralised, the technology is completely agnostic to anything but the will of the majority" is ignoring the realpolitik of this kind of situation.

Saying that Ethereum implements the will of the majority is like saying American democracy implements the will of the majority. Sort of? But meanwhile there are a lot of empirical studies [0] demonstrating that the will of the people has little to no influence over American public policy. A democratic financial system is much more corruptible than a democratic political system.

[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

I think the point they're making is that there's this common "Fallacy of the Census", which is like an appeal to popularity.

By only saying that the problems will sort themselves out because a census controls the network doesn't address the other factors that can be influencing the decisions of the majority. Essentially a census-controlled network isn't infallible (i.e. bitcoin block size debate).

We have to assume Satoshi saw this problem and actually did something about it.

No one can come out and say, "We must change bitcoin. You should follow me because I created it."

By removing the founder role, Bitcoin is just that much more decentralized.

I like the Ethereum has a founder and leadership team. I just want them to use their influence wisely.

It is better without it. Their leadership position is a bigger liability than it helps.

Yeah, recent events show the lack of leadership causes its own problems.

That reminds me of philosophic "free will". Am I really free to choose or are my thoughts and surroundings "forcing me" towards.

If the miners freely agree to accept a fork, were they really free in their decision or did they do it because of peer-pressure or because humans like to preserve groups more than anything else?

On the other hand: What would need to happen to "prove" independency of the organization?

> The latter can be betrayed or degraded even while the former is preserved.

Yes, just like a constitution. System architecture (political or otherwise) can not save mankind from the failings (of a subset) of itself.

However, use of cryptocurrencies is opt in and thus caveat emptor. The constitution OTOH is not opt-in, nor for practical purposes opt-out. You're shackled to it at birth.

Well there is a small caveat in this case. The majority of the people doing the mining run on clients that are hosted on just a few github repositories that are run by the main development team. If the developers push changes to these repos implementing the soft/hard fork... yes it is theoretically possible for these miners to reject the changes and continue on mining using the old clients but what is probably going to happen is that practically everyone is going to update to the new client and accept the forks as a patch. This is for the simple reason that most people want to keep their clients up to date and have no strong opinions on the matter. This way the development team can turn every "I don't care" vote into a "fork" vote. The idealization of independent miners is for all practical purposes an illusion.

Yes moreover the miners do care. About their profits. And not wasting electricity. Their best bet is to mine on the most likely successful codebase, which will be the core developer's code. Even if they disagree with their change!

This has been proven wrong many times in Bitcoin and Ethereum

That's a bit of an illusion though. In theory miners have a choice, but until there is an alternative with some kind of authority and following, then they are in danger of losing money by not using the new version of the de facto client which most will use unless the devs go as far as to hardcore the transfer of all funds to their own address.

Since miners are in for the money, usually they don't care about anything else as we see from other cryptocurrencies.

Also, don't mistake consensus of miners to consensus of users of the network, which is the biggest problem with most cryptocurrencies (BTS did well on that part).

Outside of crypto-anarchist circles, there's nothing cool about a 'democracy' where the only people who can vote are those who own the means of production.

Outside of rich investors who lost money and what it back you mean. Yeah plutocracies are pretty much bullshit in any circle of people who are not already rich.

Thats actually not how hard forks work. If the nodes run by the exchanges, the "economic majority", decide to fork, pretty much everyone else has to follow. Miners don't really have a say.

In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say. It's just that they're incentivized to do what the "economic majority" has to say, otherwise the economic majority can choose to hard-fork the mining algo (requiring a change in hardware investment), or, can switch to PoS, say.

http://tendermint.com/blog/on-thedao-and-blockchain-governan...

That would be a soft fork. For hard forks, the miners have very little input.

http://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks

Well, if you don't find a new mining algo that requires investment in new hardware, a blockchain with a minority of mining power behind it is vulnerable to the major chain. So nobody will use it, unless they didn't know what they were doing.

So the miners do have quite a bit of say. Depends on what your strategy for hard-forking the PoW algo is. Or, you need to understand PoS.

It's in the blog post. Read it :P

Hey, admittedly I responded without reading your blog post. Sorry about that.

In my defense, I've spent a lot of time on /r/ethereum where a lot of people think that 51% of miners are capable of changing the protocol.

Could you elaborate on the issue, I take it you're referring to this

> In a proof-of-work blockchain, nobody rational would follow a fork with less than 50% of the mining power behind it because it would be vulnerable to attack by anonymous miners unless there were also a change in the hashing algorithm that required an investment in different kinds of hardware.

51% can, but 49% can't, because the 51% can attack the 49% easily, using the 49% rules, on the 49% chain. So 49% of miners can't force a protocol change, unless the community (majority economy) can also agree on which PoW algo (with different hardware requirements) or PoS algo to hard fork to.

Good point.

But let's say we have Chain A with 51% and Chain B with 49%. If the miners on Chain A want to attack Chain B, they'd have to move their computing power onto Chain B. In which case the miners from Chain B, could attack Chain A while they're busy doing their attack on Chain B.

In the end, it would be MAD (mutually assured destruction) unless the miners from one chain had enough to defend theirs while attacking the other. For that you'd need at least 66.6(repeating, of course)% miners on Chain A with half of those able and willing to perform an attack on Chain B.

I think this would be hard to achieve.

Yeah you're right, it gets weird with close calls.

pro A: 51% pro B: 49%

If B miners move to attack A, it means B will be successfully double-spent sooner. I'm not sure how best to coordinate the attack vs defense, but pretty sure ultimately the majority would win out. And yes, there is mutual destruction in play.

This is less of an issue with say, 67% and 33%.

Anyways, I also argue that there's only room for 1 secure PoW blockchain, and that's basically Bitcoin.

> Anyways, I also argue that there's only room for 1 secure PoW blockchain, and that's basically Bitcoin.

I read your blog post, but I didn't see where you mentioned that, so it's a little hard to argue with. I do disagree, however.

Dude, he wrote the blog post. lol

But you do make a good point, miners are centric to the platform. However, they have to all agree in order to make their opinion matter. Which requires a very strong opposition to the hard fork, in this case the hard fork is the best option so they'll agree either ways.

The mining algo has nothing to do with it. As soon as the hard-forked clients get to the block on the non-forked chain where the hard-fork causes it to be rejected, it will reject the whole chain. It doesn't matter how long the chain is or how much work was applied, if the rules don't allow for the block it's rejected (and therefore the whole chain).

See my other response.

He wrote it...

> In PoW, ultimately the miners have the say.

This simply is not true.

The hard protocol rules _define_ who is and who isn't a miner. If you violate the rules the system's participants are enforcing, you're not a miner anymore as far as the protocol is concerned.

They're both true.

A minority-miner pow-chain quickly loses credibility. If say a 67% coalition of miners say that a hard-fork will not happen, then the 33% coalition of miners are in a bind, even if the exchanges choose to support the 33% -- which they won't, because it's too vulnerable to double-spend attacks.

Ergo, the minority-miner pow-chain must either also hard-fork the mining algorithm (to require investment in new hardware), or hard-fork to a non-PoW system.

I do understand your definition of a hard-fork. What I'm talking about is a protocol-extrinsic, cryptoeconomic justification of my argument. There's a game of chicken involved, for example.

True, but the core developers still have an outsized impact on the miners decision.

There's a conflicting argument happening in relation to the DAO incident: 1. Users can't be expected to know the ins and outs of the contract and its ramifications so they should not lose their investment due to the exploited contract bug. 2. Miners are autonomous and can run whatever software they want. They make technical decisions about which code changes to accept on their own.

The only way I see to accept both arguments is to assume that miners are all highly technical while your current average users are not, but that seems like a stretch to me. The truth is that miners run the software that they think is most likely to benefit them financially and that is the one that is being championed by the biggest public faces of the community.