Comment by wagwang

16 hours ago

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.

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wagwang

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woah  16 hours ago

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.

  • osigurdson  16 hours ago

    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.

tripplyons  15 hours ago

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".

HaZeust  16 hours ago

>"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).