Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enabled in Bitcoin Core

Re:Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enable... by gruez on Sunday September 27, 2020 @10:43AM (#24606999)

>So it doesn't really matter who can push code to what repo. It only matters who can organise the majority of computational power.

No, the economic majority[1] also matters. If the miners decided to hardfork bitcoin and double their mining rewards, and the non-mining users did not support this change, their fork would fail because nobody would accept their coins. This is exactly what happened to the segwit2x fork[2], which was arguably less contentious than doubling mining rewards.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/SegWit2x

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Re:Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enable... by theelous3 on Monday September 28, 2020 @07:33AM (#24615505)

Yes, this is what I meant as backfire.

Even if all of the miners made a change, if it doesn't align with the public perception, the value will vanish.

The economic majority is basically tied directly to this. It's not only the holders of btc that decide the value. The more it aligns with what the public wants from a parallel currency, the larger the want, and the larger the economic majority. If the miners disalign with the hodlers, it dies. If the miners and hodlers conspire, it still dies.

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