There is in fact nothing exceptional to what is presented here as a kind of big conspiracy:
Who wrote that it is a conspiracy? The power-law distribution of wealth is well documented in published research.
Afair, roughly 50% of the wealth is held by the top 1%. And the remaining 50% follows the actions of the coordinated whales, because the remaining 50% can't self-organize (they're only organized in a manipulation by whales). When the whales fight, they need to fight over which of them can manipulate the other 50% of peons.
Apparently the reason the whale MP hates the dumb masses is because the USG.MIT is capable of manipulating the peons with the debt-based fiat system, which thus puts the stupid and incompetent in control because manipulating the masses is not a meritocracy. This is why MP is always foaming at the mouth about how much he hates social networking, marketing, Ethereum, etc..
if a hard fork of a coin is made, then of course all owners of the coins, having double coins, will decide in the market. If there is a large preference by coin owners for one chain over the other, they will dump their holdings on one, to buy more of the other ; this will reflect in the relative market valuations of both market caps.
Whether this is done by "big whales", or by myriads of small owners doesn't really matter: it is the stake holders that split over the two coins according to their preferences. Of course, if one of the chains is largely preferred by the majority stake, the other one will be "dumped into oblivion" but there's nothing wrong with that: it is stake preference.
Is such a system decentralized given that the power-law distribution of wealth means the control is highly concentrated?
Well if the Bitcoin whales fight each other, then there can be a split which doesn't immediately devolve to winner-take-all. For example, MP alleges that Ethereum is a project of the USG.MIT and even quoted @r0ach who says Ethereum is run by the R3 consortium. He also
thinks similarly about Ripple.
So either Bitcoin is top-down controlled by a coordination of whales (e.g. MP's WoT) or it is a chaotic, ongoing, insoluble Godzilla vs. King Kong wars with us peons as fodder and collateral damage. This is why we peons prefer a winner-take-all outcome.
However, I think that all these people are missing the point: miners don't want to hard fork. The current bitcoin protocol is a dream for them. They simply don't want it changed. The only ones pushing for forks are the Core guys with Segwit, and now with change of PoW.
Core (actually afaik only some members of Core) did not aggressively propose changing the PoW until BU threatened to HF. It is not a pre-emptive action but a defensive one.
Whether the miners were happy with 1MB blocks or not, they are apparently not happy about the SegWit softfork.
And I think I may understand the reason now. The miners don't want any economic activity to occur off chain, because they want a monopoly on the economic value of Bitcoin. This relates to what I wrote in my prior post in bold text:
Perhaps it is because Bitcoin whales want to minimize the level of top-down control that themselves have via their control over the protocol.
Perhaps they think by forcing the bulk of humanity activity to be organized off chain, then it affords others the opportunity to build other systems (even other blockchain instances) which then get periodically settled back to the master Bitcoin blockchain with a hashed summary transaction.So maybe the 1MB blocksize limit is unselfish and a forward looking attempt to have more
bottom-up anti-fragility baked in? Top-down control is vulnerable to blackswans so the whales need to be concerned about blackswans wiping them out, thus more bottom-up control is better:
Essentially my major disagreement with MP seems to revolve around the mathematical fact which
MP also derived, that is essentially Taleb's anti-fragility. It seems that MP punts to a hierarchical system of control, e.g. Satoshi's PoW ledger. But what if instead we had a way to encode the laws of physics into a monetary ledger such that nobody was in control, i.e. not a winner-take-all power vacuum of non-resilience? Wouldn't that be preferred?
The BU are naive instrumentalized guys (or not so naive), that only need to exist to give counter weight to Core's desires to change bitcoin. BU is not supposed to fork for real. It only needs to bring sufficient dissent so that bitcoin can stay itself.
As such, the story becomes more involved: the only people *really wanting to fork away* are the Core side because they aren't pleased that bitcoin doesn't want to evolve according to their wishes ; that they have lost centralized control over bitcoin's protocol and cannot dictate the changes as they wish. Those stopping them, and acting as the guardians of immutability, are the miners. So the propaganda now wants to picture the miners as the people wanting change (with BU). But they would be out of their minds to want change. Bitcoin is a dream for them.
Well we'll see if BU actually attempts a hard fork.
Wouldn't miners prefer larger block sizes so that Bitcoin's economic value can grow and all on chain
And you are the one who is making elaborate conspiracy theories. Occam's Razor says the miners want everything on chain and they want larger blocks.
The ultimate scare tactics is to threaten the miners that if they don't comply to the changes Core wants, they will render their investments useless by changing PoW.
Which works both ways. By having BU threaten to HF if SegWit gains more adoption, they threaten the miners not to adopt SegWit, because it is quite clear that if BU attempts a HF and the whales are united around small blocks, then the PoW hash will be changed and the miners will all be bankrupted.
Therefor, the threat works in both directions.
If the market (the whales) is with them, then yes, Core could bring out a fork with a new PoW, and the whales would kill the original bitcoin by dumping it to go to the forked Core version.
However, that will be a much, much more risky operation than at first sight, because you would need very strong collusion to do that:
Agreed would need 80% of the whales agreeing to go for the small blocks with PoW hash change.
all exchanges would need to list "bitcoin" as the FORK, and need to list the ORIGINAL bitcoin as the alt coin.
I don't think that is absolutely necessary, since the whales will decide which ticker symbol wins.
But if you have 80% of the whales colluding, then the exchanges don't want to get spanked and will comply.
Note that it worked with ethereum: the fork went with the name. There WAS strong collusion between the whales, the Foundation, and the few exchanges listing ethereum to keep the name on the fork, and dump the original ethereum (renamed ETC) to oblivion. Note that they ALSO had collusion of the miners.
Agreed it was the collusion of the economic majority, not the ticker name in particular.
But the power structure in bitcoin is different, and the *main propaganda for bitcoin*, the "longest chain, most protected by PoW" is going to be a very strong argument AGAINST such a PoW scheme, which cannot deliver a similar PoW security as the original bitcoin which will have ALL miners behind it (they have no choice !).
The price and marketcap of Bitcoin determines the level of mining security, not the PoW hash continuity.
One set of miners get replaced by another. The bankrupted miners get millions of ASIC pet rocks.
The surviving "old bitcoin" would have a more grassroots aspect than the new "big whales" coin with low PoW. If ever the whales made a mistake, they would have their own coin amongst themselves to play with, and the "greater fools" would swarm to "cheap, true bitcoin": true bitcoin at $20, -, who wouldn't want to buy some ! With PoW like before, solid as a rock. With the 1MB blocks largely sufficient to sustain the low traffic. Bitcoin back in 2012, who wouldn't want to jump the train they missed the first time !
I call bluff.
Because only fools would enable a mining cartel that has every incentive to increase the number of tokens to 1 billion tokens, because neither the miners nor the fools own many tokens. The miners have sunk costs, ASICs, and debt.
So all those fools would debase each other into a tarpit as fools always do.
It is a huge inkblot to not remember that the whales have every incentive to protect the 21 million tokens limit, but the miners do not. That is why the whales are very likely to collude to prevent HFs by the miners. The miners must always remain slaves.
Segwit offers the fees relief every BU supporter is asking for.
It doesn't, stop lying, it was clearly explained by franky1 why it doesn't.
Core assumes attackers are going to spam LN instead of the main chain, are you telling me you actually believe in that?
Nonsense.
The whales want the fees to be too high on the main chain for you peons to use and they have their reason for that which you wouldn't understand, so they don't even bother to tell you.
But the fact is, you will not have any choice but to follow the decision of the whales.
So just keep crying in your milk, or perhaps consider
another possible future option.
If you want to gain insight, read the following thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.18339801That alone tells me Core is either flat out lying or has absolutely no clue what they're doing.
The whales know what they are doing and why.
Like I said don't treat your users like they are idiots.
Idiots can't be treated as anything other than what they are. Again the above linked thread is available for those who want to learn.