Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Pieter Wuille
On May 7, 2015 3:08 PM, Roy Badami r...@gnomon.org.uk wrote: On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:49:28PM +0200, Pieter Wuille wrote: I would not modify my node if the change introduced a perpetual 100 BTC subsidy per block, even if 99% of miners went along with it. Surely, in that scenario Bitcoin

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Cameron Garnham
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 While being in the Bitcoin community for a long time, I haven't been so directly involved in the development. However I wish to suggest a different pre-hard-fork soft-fork approach: Set a 'block size cap' in the similar same way as we set

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Adam Back
Well this is all very extreme circumstances, and you'd have to assume no rational player with an interest in bitcoin would go there, but to play your analysis forward: users are also not powerless at the extreme: they could change the hash function rendering current deployed ASICs useless in

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Pieter Wuille
I would not modify my node if the change introduced a perpetual 100 BTC subsidy per block, even if 99% of miners went along with it. A hardfork is safe when 100% of (economically relevant) users upgrade. If miners don't upgrade at that point, they just lose money. This is why a

[Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Roy Badami
I'd love to have more discussion of exactly how a hard fork should be implemented. I think it might actually be of some value to have rough consensus on that before we get too bogged down with exactly what the proposed hard fork should do. After all, how can we debate whether a particular hard

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Tier Nolan
In terms of miners, a strong supermajority is arguably sufficient, even 75% would be enough. The near total consensus required is merchants and users. If (almost) all merchants and users updated and only 75% of the miners updated, then that would give a successful hard-fork. On the other hand,

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Roy Badami
On the other hand, if 99.99% of the miners updated and only 75% of merchants and 75% of users updated, then that would be a serioud split of the network. But is that a plausible scenario? Certainly *if* the concensus rules required a 99% supermajority of miners for the hard fork to go ahead,

Re: [Bitcoin-development] Mechanics of a hard fork

2015-05-07 Thread Roy Badami
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:49:28PM +0200, Pieter Wuille wrote: I would not modify my node if the change introduced a perpetual 100 BTC subsidy per block, even if 99% of miners went along with it. Surely, in that scenario Bitcoin is dead. If the fork you prefer has only 1% of the hash power it