Re:Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubbl...
by bufferoverflow on Saturday February 17, 2018 @08:05AM
(#16400491)
That's exactly what I mean. Forks of bitcoin are not bitcoin. Though some of them are valued too.
The miners can't change bitcoin, unless the community agrees with them. They can only really join or leave with their hashing power.
I don't think bitcoin will even exist by the time it's scheduled to be mined completely (100+ years).
Re:Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubbl...
by tlrobinson on Saturday February 17, 2018 @06:42AM
(#16400284)
Ultimately miners aren’t in charge. If miners try to change the rules, but the majority of users ignore them, the miners’ fork will be close to worthless.
Re:Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubbl...
by pbhjpbhj on Saturday February 17, 2018 @08:39AM
(#16400603)
Doubt you need miners in order to process transactions, how would you do it without any miners?
Re:Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubbl...
by tlrobinson on Saturday February 17, 2018 @09:19PM
(#16404054)
If the miners are financially motivated and rational they wouldn’t refuse to mine the most valuable fork. They have a large investment in hardware and would lose a lot of money.
If for some reason they did refuse, or worse, attacked the network (with double spends or censorsing transactions) then the users could emergency fork to change the proof of work and attract new miners.
Depends what you mean by a 'particular' cryptocurrency. There's certainly been no sign of a limit on bitcoin, what with all its forks. And there's no end of alternative copycat coins filling the list at coinmarketcap.com. You have to take a leap of faith to trust that miners won't change the system once all the 'limited' 21 million original bitcoins have been produced...