side note: I'd be wary of calling blockchain's consensus mechanism "computer science", it's more of a social consensus when consensus rules are different (ie. when forks are involved).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object
Blockchains are immutable. Immutability is the property you want for elections. Blockchains are absolutely computer science. The consensus PoW mechanism is not part of 'blockchains'. It is a part of cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are simply a log-structured Merkle tree.
> We would know and be able to prove that they invalidated or ignored the results
To your new point, though, picture this: it's 2016 and you're running your election on the blockchain. Unfortunately, a consensus bug in the blockchain causes the updated nodes (say, half the network that updated) to split. The devs decide to go forward with the new consensus rules and abandon the other chain. However, we find that the tally on the abandoned chain elected Hilary and the tally on the new chain elects Trump. What happened? Were the devs co-erced? Did they introduce the bug themselves? Why was the tally different on the abandoned chain? Who collected the tally and wrote it to the blockchain?
How do we know or prove the legitimacy of the chosen blockchain over the abandoned one, as you claim?
Whether or not you could convince someone of it, it is so. The definition of an immutable data structure is that the contents of it don't change. It says nothing about interpretation. Immutability isn't some nebulous concept, it has a specific definition in computer science. And it is that the data itself does not change.
> To your new point, though, picture this: it's 2016 and you're running your election on the blockchain. Unfortunately, a consensus bug in the blockchain causes the updated nodes (say, half the network that updated) to split. The devs decide to go forward with the new consensus rules and abandon the other chain. However, we find that the tally on the abandoned chain elected Hilary and the tally on the new chain elects Trump. What happened? Were the devs co-erced? Did they introduce the bug themselves? Why was the tally different on the abandoned chain? Who collected the tally and wrote it to the blockchain?
> How do we know or prove the legitimacy of the chosen blockchain over the abandoned one, as you claim?
There is no need for consensus in an election-based blockchain, and this is not a new point, it's been my point the entire time. It's the point of all blockchain-election solutions. We can arbitrarily choose any chain, and then verify all the properties that we care about on it.
Okay, so which of the chains changed?
(Hint: neither changed; they can't change, because they're immutable).
You seem to have a chip on your shoulder with this idea the developers control the blockchains. Every time you see something about blockchain you seem to jump in and start arguing with people in favor of your pet issue. I've seen you do this on multiple threads now.
The irony is, there are some persuasive arguments for the idea that developers have too much control of blockchains, but you're not saying any of them, because you clearly don't grok the technology. You have a Wired-magazine-level understanding of the technology: you know the history and social systems around the technology but you clearly don't understand the concept of immutability as it applies to blockchain forks, or why consensus is both a social concept and a computer science concept when applied to blockchain, or how a block is validated.
In your defense, understanding blockchains requires a lot of background, and I'd say most people don't understand it. But most people aren't arguing so vehemently for their opinion.
The rest of your post is pretty offensive but I'm willing to look past it if you want to actually talk about your blockchain ideology with civility.
I honestly think the disconnect here is you're thinking in terms of bits and atoms and I'm thinking from the user's perspective. If we're going to build something useful with the blockchain, we have to think from the user's perspective. It doesn't matter if it's 2 separate "block chains", they're both attempts at finding consensus on 1 ledger: the Bitcoin ledger. That's the whole point of a distributed ledger: at any given time you may have disagreeing versions of it existing simultaneously, but it's still 1 ledger trying to find consensus so that users can know what happened actually. And if there are times where developers are ESSENTIAL to resolve ledger consensus failures, that is precisely the kind of central control that could be abused in ways Satoshi was trying to avoid. We don't even know if the 2013 bug was intentional or not. What if the developers were compromised and the fork was made so that someone could execute a large double-spend? What if this happens again in the future?
I don't usually go out of my way to tell people they are uninformed, but you're spreading very uninformed opinions around. You can't reasonably expect to spread your uninformed opinion around and not have people tell you you're uninformed. If you take offense to that, well, maybe you should limit yourself to sharing opinions about things you understand. I'm not saying this to offend or hurt you, I'm saying it because it's a fact you should be aware of.
I don't think you're dumb; you seem like a smart guy. You're just ignorant on a specific topic--and that's okay too--ignorance is fixable. But you should fix it before you start spraying your opinions on the topic around.
> I honestly think the disconnect here is you're thinking in terms of bits and atoms and I'm thinking from the user's perspective. If we're going to build something useful with the blockchain, we have to think from the user's perspective.
No, the cryptography (which has little to do with bits and nothing to do with atoms) affects users. You can't simply argue that you understand Bitcoin well enough because the social aspects of Bitcoin are the important part. Both the social aspects AND the cryptography aspects are vital to understanding--if you don't understand the cryptography you don't understand Bitcoin. Period. This is especially true when you make claims that are directly about the cryptography (such as that a block chain is not immutable) which show that you clearly don't understand it.
> It doesn't matter if it's 2 separate "block chains"
Since that is literally what a fork is, if it "doesn't matter" then why are we even talking about a fork?
> they're both attempts at finding consensus on 1 ledger
No, they're both (immutable) data structures which hold a ledger. "Attempts at finding consensus" aren't really represented by a data structure.
> What if the developers were compromised and the fork was made so that someone could execute a large double-spend?
You could start to build a plausible case for this by looking at the respective blockchains--which is, incidentally, an effect of them being immutable. But I thought this "doesn't matter".
But that's unlikely, because the fork was relevant for < 2 hours. The attacker would have had to spend their coin and the seller would have to release control of the asset they were spending the coin for, in that time.
And if a large double spend were executed, there's a good chance we'd know about it because the seller who received their coins on the 0.8 blockchain would probably be pretty angry about it.
Because if you did, you would understand that when your values (in this case, transactions) get modified unexpectedly even if they’ve been consistent for an arbitrarily long time, you cannot claim that your database is immutable. The fact that the individual attempts at consensus are immutable is irrelevant because the user only cares about the resulting ledger, which as I have proven to you over and over again is mutable.
I see what you did though, you defined “blockchain” as just an individual chain, not as the encompassing consensus-finding system... which to me is not a useful definition because it leads to misunderstandings like yours (ie. “the database is immutable”). Picture this:
Exchange: “Why did the Bitcoin I received vanish? I thought Bitcoin was immutable??!!!”
You: “Oh lol you’re terribly misinformed, it’s the data structures that are immutable, silly, not the actual database. Obviously the database consensus can fail and that can make you lose money, unless it’s controlled by trustworthy and honest people of course... who made you believe otherwise?”
Yes they are. That's not what 'immutable' means. Immutability refers to an inability to change the past. Not an inability to fork the future. A blockchain is a persistent, immutable data structure. This is just a simple fact of computer science.