Topic: Consensus Decision Making is what bitcoin needed (Read 1758 times)

Imagine that Chinese government took over most of the mining farms in china and controlled 75% of network hash power, made their fork and created client bitcoin BJ (BJ stands for BeiJing), with their party leader deciding the future coin generation scheme. What will happen?

No one will use their fork, no merchant will accept that client, no exchange will provide exchange, coins on that chain would worth nothing, those hash power working on that chain would just be wasted electricity

The soul of bitcoin network is not maintained by physical hash power(In this case you can't fight against BJ coin fork since it has majority of hash power), but through a consensus. Anything that brake this consensus automatically becomes an altcoin and will be excluded out of the current bitcoin ecosystem

Of course those hash power are strong enough to do double spending and harm the network, but they must stay in the original chain to carry out the attack. And while they are attacking, reserve hash power from everywhere of the world will fire up to regain the ground, and they better play by the rules instead of go against the system

Thanks, good topic 

The real and only power is hash power, that why proof of work.
                                                                                                       

75% is not enough?
75% can change any law in any country.
100% will make nothing to be done.

The difficult part is how to count the opinion voting. I think currently it is enough that core devs use this model to build consensus, Gavin can be a little bit forgiving when it comes to the size of increase, and others can at least cope with a relatively small first time change. Anything beyond 4 years should not be discussed at this stage, a plan of increase xxx every xxx years is just a blind guess

75% of hash power is far from 75% consensus. If that's the case, chinese government would easily lunch a super mining farm and take over 75% of hash power and modify bitcoin to whatever they see fit (we already have more than 50% hash power in china, the chinese government just need to confiscate them)

There is no such worry about being too late to change. The stress test recently showed that even every block is full, the network still works well, only a minority of people start to experience problem, and after nodes changed some configurations to block the spam transactions, the network works just like normal







 

75% consensus is enough, there is not possible to gather 75% of users and make them chose something awfully wrong with that number.
Block Size increase is not needed now but you need to do stuff like that before it will be needed. If it will be truly needed in the future there will be already too late.

In a consensus decision making model, EVERYONE's opinion is important, Gavin and Mike are no exception. They might absolutely against the idea of keeping the blocksize forever at 1MB, thus a consensus of never-changing-block size will never be reached. But that is the result of this decision making model, everyone will at least get a solution that they can live with

Someone pointed out that the priorities of bitcoin should be in following order: Consensus, decentralization, store of value, and payment system. I have not give it a thorough analysis, but I strongly agree that the consensus is the highest priority, no change should be allowed without reaching full consensus (the current status is always 100% consensus)

And the way to reach a consensus should not be based on any political means like lobbying and bribery, but through seminar and exchange of ideas

That's the reason those anarchists select this consensus based model to make decisions, it suits bitcoin community very well

Or just ignore it as noise What's wrong with bitcoin? It works well today tomorrow next week, next month...

To be precisely, fork is that crisis. Because a fork without super majority consensus will essentially kill bitcoin, it is an extinction level events that every bitcoin supporter should try their best to avoid. Since XT brought us with this potential risk, it will get strong resistance from everywhere

Core can also raise the block size, but never in a dramatic way that XT promotes

Good topic. I like

Exactly. Agree 100%.

I agree with consensus being what we need, but 75% is not enough for a hard fork, we would need more, also, they don't tell all the shitty stuff XT does, they only talk about the 8MB blocksize increase (which we don't need that much now, BTC is still a niche used software).

great post. But consensus only works in groups that have consensus to consensus. If you have rogue players like Gavin who try to undermine the consensus you have some problems. People would need to exclude anyone from the group first who does not respect the consensus principle. So, yes, it can work quite good and produce really good decisions but not as long as Gavinhearn still getting attention.

99.9999% is majority. Whats that of 75%? WTF

You want a centralized decision making?

Bitcoin is anarchistic in nature and the more people is involed the more conflict you get.

Looks like Bitcoin XT is that crisis.  I like this method for forcing a decision to be made. Instead of waiting for the crisis we wish to avoid, introducing Bitcoin XT forces the issue before we get there.

Bitcoin XT then becomes the default if no consensus can otherwise be reached. If no other consensus is reached, then consensus for XT as the default will eventually be reached instead.

This common threat serves as a catalyst for come to "REAL CONSENSUS", which I believe in our case is a block size increase on Core.


I think if we wait until that point then XT 75% will be reached in panic.


I think this Bitcoin XT model, of introducing a single general solution to the all of the problems with a 75% consensus threat into the mix, all in order to force the community to buckle down and arrive at a "TRUE CONSENSUS" on the best solution, or do nothing and agree that the introduced general solution 75% consensus threat is the best solution.

Very interesting topic. Developers note.

A following thought: If people could not reach enough consensus after all efforts, what should they do?

I think the answer is: "Do nothing until they are facing real measurable problems"

Historically, full consensus is usually reached when parties with conflicting interest are all facing the same crisis thus must act towards the same goal

So, if 1MB block is really full and many transactions are experiencing significant delay, it will raise the level of consensus of majority of members to go over to larger blocks

Currently, it is just a threat out of imagination. The stress test several weeks ago has proved that even every block is more than full, the network can still process the transaction normally, and nodes only need to add one line of configuration to discard those very-low-fee transactions to prevent them from entering the mempool

Imagine that one day, even a legitimate 0.01 BTC fee transaction can not be processed (Which makes bitcoin more expensive than bank), then it is very easy to reach consensus to raise the block size

Side chain supporters will try to persuade people to use their solution, but similarly, people must reach enough consensus on that matter. Just read a research paper from bank of england, it said, you don't always need trustless model everywhere. To use offchain financial service, some large wallet service provider is enough, because the transactions are small, the risk for each individual is also small

Based on statistics, majority of bitcoin transactions on blockchain are larger than 0.05 BTC, e.g. $10. So a fee higher than 0.005 btc will start to affect small transactions significantly, but we are far from reaching that status yet

What incentive? When your coins suddenly doubled overnight, won't you sell half of them on the chain that you don't like?

It is highly likely that those who commanding 25% of the hashing power on core chain owns 75% of existing coins (Majority of new ASIC hash power are speculative late adopters and have mined only a little coins so far) Besides, what if satoshi decided to use his 1 million coins to wipe out the XT chain's value?

Fork is suicide