I was able to have a look at your argument
I didn’t want this post be your opinion against mine, after all we are all humans that can misunderstand things or simply think differently. We aren’t perfect but we seek more knowledge.
Back to the point, Satoshi solved the Byzantine generals problem, right? so let us imagine that the emperor or the people of the byzantine empire pushed for replacing the generals or changing their armament (algorithm) with totally different tech?
Not that it’s like we should or anything but just an example that those miners may not be the most important factor in the system. Yeah replacing them may come with cost and may fail to perform like the previous generals but IMHO success is still possible with different generals.
Miners are the only actor capable of resolving disputes by voting or hashwar.
The devs technically cannot vote in a decentralized way even if they wanted to.
The only exception might be PoS, voting with money, plutocracy. Technically this form of voting is possible. And by the way, the BMP protocol serves “as is” for this purpose, it is only necessary to change the way in which the weight of each address is computed (changing hashpower by value).
However, this change implies another split, a new project. And even if you succeed, we have precedents of voting percentages lower than 0.4% even in maximum flame conflicts. That is, it means empowering another super-minority of morons probably worse than the central devs.
I like miners because they are always the result of competition, then competent. And because it is what Satoshi invented here.
But I totally understand you talking bad about them. I do too. This whole thing has been a colsal catastrophe and continues to be.
Their competence is specialized, in doing the job Satoshi intended for them: trustless timestamping service. That’s it. That’s the job, run a piece of software with 100% uptime, the more efficient you can do that, more money for you. If people want to project their personal fantasies on miners, it’s up to them. Of course they also must be competent in running a business that takes electricity as input and more than it’s worth in fiat money as crypto output, and where efficiency wins by others may kill your margin and take you out. Maintaining their margins is their main job, not resolving human disputes external to the blockchain.
But I totally understand you talking bad about them.
Who’s talking bad - I did not intend a value statement, it’s just a matter of fact - there’s no incentive for miners to get involved in deciding the purpose of the network. If it pays for sha-256 hashes, they mine as long as they can sell the reward for whatever currency they pay electricity in. If they want to use their hard-earned money to fund projects of the coins they mine, that’s cool - but they don’t really need to, better go on a vacation or something. As long as BTC is the top dog that pays for sha-256, their business model is pretty much guaranteed. If there was a threat to changing the algo of BTC, then you can be certain they’d covertly try to lobby so that it doesn’t happen, they probably already have covert influence on BTC. One thing is for sure: they won’t go and tell you that on the BMP.
Hash wars are special, and they have appeared in special conditions of the ecosystem. It was a matter of survival, and actions were in domain of miners, so they did something. And again - you ignore anonymous nature of mining. We have no clue what could’ve been happening behind closed doors, with whom the miners were talking to decide how to act. Here’s a conjecture - is it possible that some other entity simply rented the hashpower and took the loss for the bigger picture? That wouldn’t have been a loss for sha256 hardware owners but for the speculating entity who temporarily footed the electricity bill. We don’t know and can’t know, and they won’t tell us!
Power vacuum for me? Lol - I have no power, and I’m new here. The power I have is same as yours - the power to talk and talk and talk, and maybe convince people that implementing something in software everyone will run is a good idea. If you’re frustrated by people not realizing the genius of BMP, that’s your choice.
WTF?, you have said in 12 different ways that miners have no incentive for network decision making. I have provided you evidence that it has happened, on-chain, beyond all doubt. And now you say this bullshit.
Bitcoin consensus mechanism is based on hashpower only. And it can be enforced by hashwar.
This mechanism was specifically designed to resolve disputes, by reorg (intentional or not).
Dispute resolution is the whole main point of Bitcoin and the whitepaper basically describes a dispute resolution mechanism by hashpower voting.
I’m not here for you to waste my time with your small centralized vision.
How can I be frustrated if I have zero responsibility for BCH being below the TOP 20?
I’m just the messenger pointing out the why.
They generally don’t and those hash wars were the exception, not the rule. When BTC was about to get forked, everything was at stake for SHA-256 stakeholders because BTC was the main source of SHA-256 block reward revenue. Now that BTC has settled in stone, what do they care about coins that account for 1% of their total addressable SHA-256 market? If BCH suddenly gets 2% hashrate when it is at 1% block reward value, how can you know that it was a miner’s decisions and not some external entity who paid for the difference?
Your evidence is based off 2 publicly accessible time-series (for each coin): difficulty and market price. That’s it. And it shows that, for some temporary amount of time, mining was allocated sub-optimally. That’s a fact, I’m not denying the WHAT. I’m denying your explanation about what that data means, the WHY it so happened. I’m saying it probably won’t happen again in the same way. I’m talking about why hashrate won’t ever get used as a general dispute resolution mechanism.
Right, then BTC must be at the top because they have successfully implemented your miner voting system /s.
It was designed to resolve a specific dispute between equally valid blocks competing to extend the chain. It was not designed to resolve disputes over what makes a valid block valid. Hashrate can’t decide on the consensus rules it is bound by.
Why don’t you then use it to phone some miners and ask them the WHY, why they don’t give a f? Ah, you have the explanation ready: they must be stupid, fooled by those sweet-talking devs. Because only stupid people can manage multi-million businesses with thin margins. Maybe it is THEY who don’t want their time wasted by people misunderstanding mechanics of cryptocurrencies that want to give them a job that they don’t want to do. They voted alright - to simply ignore anyone who wants to give them these extra jobs of deciding on things.
“Coincidentally” you share the same narrative with Core devs, CSW, Amaury…
For a centralized decision-making there was no need to wait for the 2008 whitepaper genius.
Then you wonder why it stopped raining money from miners.
Then you wonder why the Bitcoinland disaster (not only BCH; BTC, BSV, XEC… all a mess, well known).
Only it’s not. Who decides which software maps to which ticker and what market price? Not the devs, not the miners.
Nobody can force a particular software on anyone. Not miners, not devs, not anyone. People voluntarily run software that matches a particular consensus specification. When specification is incompatible by accident it’s a temporary lonely chain. When it’s intentionally made incompatible by convincing enough people to run it, then it forms another network - and blockchain external agents (the market) decide the mapping of the consensus specification to a currency.
Exchanges should always assign the ticker to the blockchain supported by the majority of hashpower. And the miners should hashwar via empty blocks + reorg against the minority blockchain in hashpower controlled by the central devs.
And this is how the 1MB conflict and all the others should have been resolved.
And there is record that this was discussed and there was 100 million on the table to do it.
Miners cannot resolve anything, any dispute, again: because they are not active players in the crypto ecosystem. They are followers; they don’t make decisions; because they do not want it.
They have repeatedly proven this over and over and over and overagain.
Maybe having big political powers like US and China directly involved in mining will change something decades into the future, but that is not absolutely certain.
Miners do not care what is going on in politics and internal project developments decisions. They just turn on the excavators and mine whatever is profitable like there is no tomorrow.
Therefore BCH developers should just make best possible decisions and make the best possible software that executes the intended original goal of Bitcoin project (meaning P2P money without intermediaries); then assume that miners will just run it, without questioning.
This is how it has been so far and there is no reason to believe something will change in the near future.
