MIT Chose Ethereum’s PoS as Top Technological Breakthrough

There's no intrinsic part of bitcoin that requires you to trust them. He might own a large amount of bitcoin, or have some sway in bitcoin core development, but that does not equal unilateral control authority of the protocol.

Can you prove that tokens are sufficiently distributed? It is trivial for a large staker to masquerade as many individuals.

Can you ensure that no small group will ever one take take the a controlling stake, either by time and patience or by violent force, coercing or killing other stakers?

And yes, it would cause people to lose confidence, which is why this kind of attack probably won't happen unless Ethereum or some other PoS system achieves a much greater level of global dominance where it has become too big to fail.

No I agree you can't prove they are distributed, but I don't see the threat as realistic. I also think the only reason for someone to take a controlling stake and attack the network would be to kill Ethereum and make everyone lose confidence. Bitcoin is susceptible to the exact same attack, someone could build or buy enough mining power and cause a huge reorg to wreak havok.

I take your point that Bitcoin could more easily recover from this, as new mining hardware can be built by honest participants unlike tokens, but it would take too long. It would be too late to restore confidence at that point anyway.

I think both networks are resistant to the attack for the same reason, it's just too expensive. You could argue that Ethereum is actually more resistant, as buying tokens drives up the price. Bitcoin has the opposite economies of scale. The more chips an attacker produces, the better they get at making them, and the more cheaply they can amass hashrate.

> You realize if there is a fork in Bitcoin, your coins would exist on both sides of it right?

In theory. In practice a lot of people will never bother to track splits, understand the intricacies of what a given fork means; case in point here where you claim that Bitcoin Cash split off BTC despite their pursuing the original architecture of Bitcoin proper, and BTC going a completely different direction with lightning forced in as a core part of the architecture and total on chain throughput permanently limited to a level which makes it useless as anything more than a toy.

> If they do something you don't like you can continue using the other fork, there is literally nothing stopping you or anybody else, and you did not lose any funds

The important thing is that they can set the characteristics of the monetary base of BTC to arbitrarily whatever they want without limit, and this has effects on what that monetary base is able to accomplish. For example; they can force it to never be used as a peer to peer electronic currency for the world, it doesn't take much of a reach to imagine who might want to do such a thing and what other goals and projects they might want to steer BTC toward, that may well have nothing to do with the interests of BTC holders nor the reasons they've convinced themselves that they're holding it.

Their interests don't matter though, and the reasons they think they're holding it don't matter either. What matters is what the core council of developers announce from on high is the future direction of the chain, all else be damned, that's what you're going to be stuck with. At the moment you think "I've been duped" your options are either to divest and have your goals thwarted, or fork off and lose enormous amount of momentum and historical record and most likely if history is any example, only one in a million will even notice what happened and what your fork was for.

You come out ten years later as a settlement layer for central banks and shake your head wondering what the hell happened, then you realise you never really understood it to begin with.

> Node operators who didn't intentionally switch over to the Bitcoin Cash software were mining on the original Bitcoin chain, not the other way around.

Which is to say; they were entirely duped by the complete change in direction and went right on just mining the way they were beforehand despite the difference.

> The bcash "original vision" argument is extremely tiresome. If you think that's the "real Bitcoin" then you are free to use it, but that's not what the world at large settled on.

"The world" didn't settle on anything, centralised exchanges allocated the BTC ticker to whatever was blessed by the core BTC client as "bitcoin core" and that's all she wrote. Most people have no idea it happened, and even fewer why or how. And the fact that happened so silently with so little fanfare and so completely is exactly why BTC is such an utter failure at what it actually set out to do and what so many people foolishly continue to believe it still is.

> That's because most splits are basically worthless, not worth the trouble of cashing out. Bcash was an exception that gained traction, and most people did track it.

Right, because you can't fool all the people all the time. You can do a good enough job though that even in relatively obscure forums like hacker news posters refer to the chain that just wanted to actually execute on the original mission by the derogatory title slapped onto it by the exact same saboteurs that forced their agenda over the original. And that matters at scale when you're considering the entirety of the global economy. It drastically impacts how much difference you can make.

> Then use the other side of the fork?

That isn't the point at all. If you invest in a hospital because you think it's a good investment and because you approve of the mission statement of a hospital, and it spins off an abbatoir and starts butchering baby calves and selling veal instead because it thinks that's somehow superior to the original mission, your ability to sell your stock in the abattoir doesn't change the fact that the economic impetus that went into the hospital is now almost entirely behind the abattoir. And so it has been with BTC, it was turned from decentralised currency to disintermediate central banks to a shitty, low quality, captured centralised settlement layer for those exact same central banks, and all the while it mostly kept the public relations layer from the original project, and most people still claim that's why they're interested in it, screaming calves in the abattoirs or not.

The core point is they hold absolute power over BTC as an enterprise and what it is or will be able to accomplish in the future, and holders are purely along for the ride come what may.