Did they really act without political control driving their choice?
(Answer: obviously not, although I would use the word influence rather than control.)
The Nash equilibrium is an economic game theory form of control.
Influence is an apt term also, but I used control because the miners have to enforce the protocol that they think the majority will, because otherwise they waste their hashrate and suffer economic losses. This is the Nash equilibrium.
Satoshi uses the phrase "cooperating to attack the network". If the miners are acting independently they are not cooperating, and if they are influenced or coordinated by a third party they are not acting independently, they are cooperating (albeit indirectly).
There is not really any such thing as a non-attack soft fork in a properly functioning (i.e. mining not centralized) PoW chain, because without some mechanism to cooperate, the game theory does not support an individual miner ever activating a soft fork. In order to reject a non-conforming block the miner would have to mine on a shorter chain which is individually irrational.
There is not really any such thing as a non-attack soft fork in a properly functioning (i.e. mining not centralized) PoW chain, because without some mechanism to cooperate, the game theory does not support an individual miner ever activating a soft fork. In order to reject a non-conforming block the miner would have to mine on a shorter chain which is individually irrational.
Agreed, that is the Nash equilibrium of PoW; and proof-of-stake doesn't have it, because PoS doesn't consume a resource i.e. nothing-at-stake.
Responding to another comment upthread, miners can not perform a hard fork. A hard fork has to be adopted by the entire community, including both mining and non-mining nodes. This mistake is made endlessly in the Ethereum community. I don't know if Vitalik is encouraging it or what.
Agreed. If most payers and payees refuse to sign and honor transactions on the hard fork, then the fork dies because miners receive no transaction fees and can't exchange any coinbase block rewards for any value.
We might argue though that the power over forks held by the payers and payees is asymmetric to that of the miners, because 51% of the miners decide the longest chain, but closer to 100% of the payers/payees are required to reject a majority hashrate fork.
The entire whole point of immutability and censorship resistance is to protect minorities, and the above-described game-theory is precisely what accomplishes this. By design (though not in practice today), miners are powerless functionaries with no meaningful discretion.
That critically important point should be emphasized more often. Miners should not have any political power, because if they did then corruption or 666 shit like MIT's proposed ChainAnchor (a way to force KYC on the block chain) could become a reality and then minorities could be fucked with by whomever can capture the power vacuum of political control and influence.
If you want decisions made by a voting majority you can just create a corporation and have it run a database server. That is vastly more efficient than a blockchain with effectively the same result.
That is what Daniel Larimer's (Bitshares') DPOS and DASH's masternode schemes (both are variants of PoS) argue is the solution to scaling.
But they forsake the protection of minorities and Nash equilibrium, thus they really aren't secure. Security via majority control is not stable, as Daniel Larimer painfully discovered.
All soft forks (even ones universally-recognized as benign such as those used in Bitcoin for upgrades) are a warning flag that the coin is not very decentralized and is not secure against miners cooperating to attack the network. If Ethereum soft forks to freeze or transfer coins, and this is a result of the structure of the ecosystem, it will demonstrate not only that the network is insecure, but that the ecosystem itself is incompatible with having secure network.
I agree. Proof-of-burn is a better way to do forks, giving every HODLer the option whether to join the new block chain or not. This allows competition of forks so that one development group can't have absolute influence over the development direction.
If we want to create a new block chain design and we don't have the $4 trillion black budget resources of the DEEP STATE which "Satoshi" had at his disposal, then we either need some funding for development or we need to take the slow route of volunteerism/donations.
I don't think it makes any sense to argue that funding will create centralized control structure and volunteerism won't. Monero has periodic forks built into the protocol and the same set of devs since launch have most of the political influence on the Nash equilibrium.
So I think what it really boils down to is the open source code. If that code benefits society no matter how it was achieved, then someone can fork it and make a better distribution with less centralized control. Thus I will argue there is nothing wrong with raising funding for developing open source. And if the core dev(s) are conscientious and remove their influence over time and do not create any forks that aren't proof-of-burn, then that could be even better than what we have now with Blockstream.
That shouldn't really be a surprise though, with one person being given so much de facto authority that is the only real result possible.
If you doubt his authority, just imagine hypothetically how the process would be proceeding if Vitalik had never proposed forking, or if he opposed it. There would be vastly more opposition, more debate (or less because it would be seen as an absurd idea not even worth debating), and the forks would be far less likely to ever happen.
If you doubt his authority, just imagine hypothetically how the process would be proceeding if Vitalik had never proposed forking, or if he opposed it. There would be vastly more opposition, more debate (or less because it would be seen as an absurd idea not even worth debating), and the forks would be far less likely to ever happen.
Or imagine if "His Eminence Master Lord V" had a heart attack and all those n00bs in The DAO had no leader to protect them from their lack of due diligence.
