Comment by osigurdson
18 hours ago
>> It took just five hours before a “soft fork” was rolled out
This is the dumb part about today's crypto imo. It is just a type of consensus among humans. People like to say its "all math" or some fundamental property of nature but that isn't true at all. It is a constant in a text file + people agreeing on its value. I.e. if a sufficient number of people agree that "we're bumping it up to 1 billion now", that is how many there would be. The argument really is how much better is this mechanism than other stores of value? Fiat currency is also a number where some people are given a magic wand to make more of it up on the spot. Gold is something that you either store in your house and hope that it is real or have someone else store it for you (or pretend to store it). Real estate is fine until the city / government decides that you don't own the title anymore. Basically it is a comparison of one absurd mechanism vs other absurd ones but perhaps Bitcoin is less absurd in the final analysis.
I've been asking for quite some time what the fundamental difference is between BTC and BCH that would warrant such a price difference. I've not heard an answer that has satisfied me yet.
Some arbitraries are better than other arbitraries. For bitcoin, you'd need 50% of supply to arbitrarily make decisions which is a pretty high threshold, and for all its faults, there hasn't been any egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs.
That's not how Bitcoin works at all. No amount of the supply (or hashpower) can let you make arbitrary decisions.
Having 50+% of the hashpower could let you double spend by mining on two forks in parallel, but it will never let you change the rules of the protocol, since these are defined on clients run by many people.
In fact that is what happened in the article. Someone realized there was a problem, got everyone to change their clients, and it changed. The first person to notice the bug did not need to hold any Bitcoin at all to make this change.
Right but some number of humans can collectively decided to change literally anything about Bitcoin. It isn't some fundamental constant of nature. The question really is who are the humans that could actually decide this, what are their incentives, what would make them decide to change it? If only you and I are running the original Bitcoin code then it isn't really Bitcoin. "Real" Bitcoin is a function of human decisions and has fundamentally very little to do with the code. Purchasing Bitcoin is simply a decision to trust this group of humans.
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There is nothing wrong with having 50% of the supply. The protection is based on the distribution of hashing power. An attacker with 51% of the hashing power can double spend, but cannot "arbitrarily make decisions".
>"egregious soft forks on bitcoin for almost 20 yrs."
What?? Are we just going to forget about BTC, BCH and BSV? Same thing happened with Ethereum too - with Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Those are hard forks, which require validators to run different code.
It’s a dumb PvP game that you can try to beat! But so is everyone else! Now nation states are competing against each other and the private sector!
Bitcoin is a mind virus that’s working. It co-opts human minds and synthetics to support itself. If you understood that perspective, you would have contributed to its growth earlier, others get it later.