Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#481

Post by runeks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

Geee wrote: post #90

jayd16 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do users have control over miners or developers? If the assumption is that corruption can overcome a democratic state, I never understood why its so crazy to suggest it can overcome developers or a mining cartel.

Bitcoin is open-source software. Users decide which version they want to run. Developers and miners can't force users to switch to another version. Some miners tried to force an upgrade on users in 2017 which was averted with a threat of user activated soft fork.[0] [0] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-independence-day...

> Developers and miners can't force users to switch to another version.

Miners can, but it’s costly. By a majority mining empty blocks on the chain they wish users to switch away from they make that chain useless. However, they need to sacrifice profit on some other chain (by not mining on that) to do so.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#482

Post by runeks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

superice wrote: post #197

anonporridge wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Inflation is a tax.

Inflation is a "tax" on owning money, an equalizing force if you will. Deflation is a "tax" imposed that benefits large holders of the currency on people who hold less or none of that currency. There is ofcourse also the moral argument for inflation: society pays you because you it values what you sold or did. That valuable service is not going to be worth as much 50 years into the future, so inflation is the cost im…

> Inflation is a "tax" on owning money, an equalizing force if you will. Deflation is a "tax" imposed that benefits large holders of the currency on people who hold less or none of that currency.

The problem is that these “large holders of currency” are the poorest people. Rich people have their wealth invested in various assets, e.g. stocks, bonds, land. The poorest people live paycheck to paycheck and can’t possibly invest in anything.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#483

Post by runeks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

janandonly wrote: post #211

sam0x17 wrote: post #155

The death-knell in my opinion for true decentralization of the bitcoin network (ignoring mining for a moment) happened when the blockchain became too large for it to be practical for normal users to have the whole blockchain on their machine and operate a real node. I am sure there is some creative solution to this, perhaps an additional mining process by which old records are combined to save space (i.e. transaction…

The current BTC blockchain size is 422GB [1] so that easily fits on a single 1TB SSD. How is that "too large" ? [1] https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/

You can easily store the blockchain (which is mostly historical data, ie. “empty accounts”) on an old (rotational) HDD because you access it in a sequential manner, which is fine for old HDDs. It’s only the set of “non-empty accounts” (unspent transaction outputs in technical terms) that you need random access to. But this data can be stored in RAM since it’s only about 3.5GiB.

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#484

Post by volkanvardar » Mon, Nov 01, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

So, can we say that it is kind of centralized?

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#485

Post by eraad » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #364

glenvdb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network. The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewa…

So, let's play that out. Suppose 90% of miners (hash power) collude (as GP posited), for example validating blocks with a larger coinbase (mining reward). The "good" nodes don't accept these (but the "bad" miners can trivially have many nodes that do accept them). But now the "good" hash power drops to 10%, so only every 100 minutes a "good" block is mined (suppose this happened just after a difficulty adjustment), a…

Is this just a hard fork? This exists, I believe its called Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin "Satoshi Vision".

Re: Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

#486

Post by corobo » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

nuerow wrote: post #180

corobo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would have been the case if crypto had been used as a currency instead of as any other stock asset You can't use it anywhere as currency! I guess you can buy weed with it online, but that's about it

> You can't use it anywhere as currency! I guess you can buy weed with it online, but that's about it The same can be said about jugs of Tide detergent, but somehow that's not presented as disruptive technology of the future.

Man I've never had a dealer take Tide detergent