"Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...
The whole process of running your own node has improved so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.
It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.
more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k
Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes with advertising as we see today in “normal” elections.
You're missing the energy part of the equation (opex), that is continuously required.
Please point me in the direction where I can find some of these free ASIC miners.....
Run your own full node,
easiest option: getumbrel.com
In the event that a censored party can create a heavier chain (has >50% of the mining power) then the argument that its more censorship resistant holds, but on the PoS side, you would be betting that not a single participant in the main chain included their new stake registration in their blocks. This is different than the PoW model as non-malicious nodes in PoW can still be part of the main chain. It's definitely not that cut and dry
Correcting that is the main point of this comment, the rest is just a side note.
I don’t really understand your point #2, but this very well may be because I don’t understand the proposed protocol.
You say “as long as they don’t double stake”, but if a given block is expected to probably be in the consensus chain, then either they don’t endorse it or whatever, not putting their stake behind it, and therefore, I would think whatever they do put their stake behind, if the block-to-be-censored is included in the long-run consensus, then what they backed isn’t, and so they get no reward, and so they lost out on potential reward, or, if they try to support multiple things, they lose (some fraction of) their stake.
Uh, unless they can be rewarded for supporting a block that is parallel to the block-to-censor even though the block-to-censor gets in? But that doesn’t seem right. I suppose there are uncle blocks maybe (idk if that is part of Ethereum’s planned PoS system or just its current system), but those have a substantially lower reward, so deliberately producing probably-uncles would still involve giving up rewards on average.
Again I could easily be missing something here.
Censored transactions can hire/pay miners who won't censor more transaction fees, to encourage them to include the transactions in a block. In other words, since transactors pay miners, transactors are customers of miners.
There is an open market competition– any miner censoring transactions will lose higher fees from people who send censored transactions.
These statements are not in conflict.
I deleted a previous reply to you because I think I may have misunderstood what you wrote. In any case, are you saying the majority of miners have the ultimate control of the protocol rules of the cryptocurrency?
In 2017, the majority of miner hashpower wanted to change the Bitcoin protocol to increase 1MB blocksize to 2MB but the SegWit2x failed to be adopted. What's your interpretation of that event?
I'm not saying 51% of miners decide what the rules are. Suppose you had a Bitcoin fork that had 80% of the hashrate. How long would that situation need to persist until the major network participants decide to call that fork "Bitcoin"?
Existing PoW miners can fork away from any new miners that won the last block.
Mining is expensive and low margin. Generally, the people who own the most Bitcoins are not the same as the people with the most mining rigs, the two parties tend to be completely divorced, and the miners tend to be strongly incentivized around not rocking the boat (for better or worse).
The other misunderstanding is that mining doesn't shape the protocol. The users shape the protocol, and can run any validation software they want. No user has to accept a block by a miner, and every block made by a miner has to conform to the protocol's rules.
POS isn't permissionless -- you literally have to buy a stake from existing holders in order to participate.
Yes it is. You can manufacture your own mining rig, with no-one else's permission, without ever needing to so much as communicate with anyone who currently holds any bitcoin.
> To add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities of that electricity use.
Most cryptocurrency developers ignore the externalities of all the crime they're enabling, so it's not like the miners are any worse.
The probability that a raspi ever mines a block (like, if it were to start now, not if it was going since the network first started) is negligible.
Therefore, I consider the probability that a given raspi would contribute to the security of the network, or, I suppose equivalently, the degree to which it contributes, to be negligible.
The prospect that there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin is ensured by nothing except majority opinion. It's not inconceivable that this will be relaxed in the future and Bitcoin will have a "Bitcoin Classic" fork where old rules are enforced. This could happen if, for instance, transaction fees don't make up for miner majority rewards.
The informal consensus of network full (non-mining) nodes enforce that. Full nodes are economic actors, such as people who sell goods and services, who fully verify the chain. They simply refuse accept inflated Bitcoin.
A Bitcoin full (non-mining) node only takes 5GB storage space and 128MB RAM to run.
It does that now, but there is no guarantee that this consensus holds. Maybe it's quite likely that it holds, but nothing guarantees it.
> Full nodes are economic actors, such as people who sell goods and services, who fully verify the chain. They simply refuse accept inflated Bitcoin.
They can refuse to accept inflated Bitcoin, but somebody has to mine new blocks. If the vast majority of miners decide to do something, the remaining miners will have trouble mining new blocks and the entire system is heavily disrupted.
As you say, they are economic actors, so when faced with the decision of having a severe service disruption and giving in to miner demands, the choice may well be the latter. After all, why would they prefer to use a "original Bitcoin" that only has 1% of the hash rate? Because it has the original brand?
It's ironic that even modest monetary inflation is considered bad by so many Bitcoin proponents when that inflation is what pays for the Bitcoin network. Perhaps some day, transaction costs will make up for it, but that is not a given.
> A Bitcoin full (non-mining) node only takes 5GB storage space and 128MB RAM to run.
It's completely irrelevant how many non-mining nodes there are. The only thing that matters is who runs them (exchanges, merchants, actual users).
Why would anyone mine Bitcoin that merchants don't accept?
But definitions are choices. People are free to choose what definitions they think of as “the definition of <x>”. Some such choices are likely to cause more confusion when they interact with others, but this is not always sufficient to discourage/prevent some faction of people from choosing some definition that differs from that used by some other faction.
Under the definition you are using for bitcoin, such a thing would not be the thing that you currently would consider bitcoin. That’s fine.
This doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t use the name “bitcoin” for it.
Perhaps 2000 years from now, the word “bitcoin” will instead refer to apples instead, due to random linguistic drift. (Or, a fruit which resembles apples. Will they technically count as apples, according to our current notion of apples?)
That's your opinion.
> There of course will be forks that dont, but they are not bitcoin.
Again, that's your opinion.
At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS