7 ms·
If they start to play with different rules, one of the hard fork remaining branches (or both) will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. Ther
by arcatek 5y ago
If they start to play with different rules, one of the hard fork remaining branches (or both) will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless.
There's no telling whether it'd be the "hijacked" branch or the original one - assuming they control 50%+ of the mining power, there's a decent argument that the remaining miners would follow their lead if only to stay on the largest branch.
- capableweb 5y agoDevelopers of the core protocol would notice, add a flag and then miners/clients/exchanges who want to remain with the same dev team can signal they want to follow the "dev" chain instead of the "miner" chain. Usually forks have checkpoints as well so things can't change willy-nilly.
- jstanley 5y agoIf blocks in the "miner" chain break the rules of the "dev" chain, then no flag is required. You'll automatically stick with the chain that contains valid blocks, as determined by the implementation that you're running.
- brighton36 5y agoEventually the us government will decide what codebase is valid. And exchanges will immediately switch to that codebase. Probably that codebase will support kyc and whitelist/blacklist functions. Bitcoin is fiat. It doesn't have 79 protons in it's nucleus.
- dannyw 5y agoWhat miners do is irrelevant: the code known as bitcoin, with a 21M hard cap, simply will reject any block that creates more than its allowed bitcoins as invalid, the same way it rejects a random string of bytes as invalid.
- danbruc 5y agoDepending on your definitions this might or might no be true but it also might be totally irrelevant. There is a protocol and system specification. There are implementations of that specifications. There is a distributed system running those implementations. And the distributed system has a state. Each of those can change and each of those or a combination of them could arguably be called Bitcoin. If everyone would run new implementations with a different coin cap, you can argue that it is no longer Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a very specific specification with a 21M coin cap, but this would have little bearing on the actual situation.
- jstanley 5y agoThe point is you need the economic majority to be on side in order to succeed with a hard fork. Just the top 50 miners switching on their own isn't enough.
- thesz 5y agoAdd 50 more - to reduce hash rate even more. Announce hard fork right after difficulty adjustment. And then, suddenly, these who have not forked will be stalled for several weeks. Instead of 10 minutes per block, the time will be 30 minutes and possibly more. And to adjust the difficulty those who have not forked would need... a hard fork? Yes, these 100 miners are pools. But where pool participants will go then? Will pools who have not forked keep pool participation fees low? Etc. The game here is not quite simple. It is much more complex than appears at first sight.