Do miners control fork decisions?
#asknostr
Discussion
Node consensus required 🧐🤔
Yes.
Miners - Pools - Nodes, have final say.
They execute them, but no
Node operators do
Obviously much more complicated then that in detaul
Let's unpack the detail.
Mining pools run nodes.
They are a factor but they are not final consensus, the users are
How so?
If they fork and the new coins they are mining are worthless then it won't matter what they did
Exactly miners will direct their hash to whatever is more profitable self interest always wins.
What if BlackRock and Saylor pick a fork nwhat becomes profitable?
Maybe they will but the majority will need to agree for it to become the dominant chain. And if not the minority chain will still exist and can be used by whoever chooses to use it. The key is you cannot force ppl what chain to support.
I agree with the last sentence but idk how relevant it is to current landscape.
But on the other hand if everyone dumps Saylor-Blackcockcoin it will become just another BCH or BSV or one of the many failed forks.
Let's just do a summary of '17 block wars
It all comes down to the collective consensus imo
The relationship between;
- validators (node runners)
- asic's
- users (usually both above)
Even though Ver & Jihan had at one time over half of all ASIC's hash pointing to bcash, it ultimately failed for reasons we know why; not the way to "scale" a time chain
So to me, its the relationship of everyone above, regardless who has the most hash power.
tbh why I've been actively funding devs since '19, the real people in control of everything is the devs; coding away on git and pushing commits, making sure the codebase is sound
- my real fear is not majority hash into a bad actors hands (not even 50%, more like 30%); it's the state funding hundreds of devs to program and commit "unwanted" code to the codebase.
This can be done over many years, even decades without anyone really noticing.
The real fear is becoming more relevant.
Absolutely not.
miners definitely run nodes like you mentioned in a comment, but node runners ultimately control the decisions because they decide what is a valid transaction and whether or not to broadcast said transaction.
If you make a fork that nobody adopts and it's just your mining pool, running that fork and the rest of the network says to bug off, your transactions are invalid, then you get a Bitcoin Cash / BSV scenario.
What % of the network needs to fork off to have majority hash and exchanges?
Over 50% is a simple answer, but if you look back at 2017 BCH, Despite having some major miners, exchanges, and even certain prominent early Bitcoin advocates support it, it still failed to become the dominant chain because it couldn't convince enough of the full node network to switch.
From the 2017 SegWit2x attempt we saw that even ~90% miner signaling wasn't enough when a strong majority of nodes opposed the change. It proves that raw hash power percentage isn't the critical factor.
The miners are incentivized to go with the majority. If a large-scale miner is mining a fork that nobody uses, they're gonna go under pretty fucking fast. Especially if they're trying to push a change and their blocks keep getting rejected by the network as invalid.
Would say that lightning nodes operators have the most power. It's their bitcoin nodes not miners.
😐
Ok
I'm reading The Blocksize War right now, this was a central point of disagreement between the factions. The small blockers believed not and they won unconditionally. That pretty much settled the question.
It used to be the case that Satoshi would just yolo a new client out there with a consensus rule change and everybody would upgrade. This was what we would call a UASF today. So UASF was the original form of soft fork. As bitcoin grew in value the drawbacks of this system started to become known. It's a risky play because you can't prevent a fork from occurring if some mining node with significant hashrate doesn't upgrade in time and mines a block that is invalid under the new, more restrictive, rules.
Starting with the CLTV soft fork, developers implemented activation signaling logic. The idea is to get miners to explicitly opt in to the ruleset change by flipping a block header bit from 0 to 1 in the blocks they mine. This was the beginning of miner 'voting' on soft forks. It wasn't long before motivated reasoning lead some parties to conclude that miners controlled the chain. They went to war with this belief and, well, the rest is history.
The reason node runners want to poll block producers before activating a consensus rule change is to prevent a disastrous chain fork and potential wipeout reorgs. This would be bad for all bitcoiners, regardless of which set of consensus rules their node enforces. Block template producers can vote with their blocks to delay a fork only if the fork attempt is made with activation signaling logic.
Basically miners can say no if users ask nicely. If users can't get their fork activated the nice way, they can get out the nuke launch codes and run a UASF client.
What was the market cap of majority hashrate in 2017? What levers did they control? What other major economic players are involved? I think the playing field has drastically shifted.
You should read Blocksize Wars if you haven't. It's really good! Sounds like you should read this report also for a more contemporary assessment. I haven't read it but some nuance I picked up from a podcast is that big investors have the longest lever these days. But they can't use it until after the fork occurs, at which time they can dump one side and pump the other.
I've put off reading that one. I probably should
Generals are always prepared to fight the last war
What has changed since the BlockSize War?