If bitcoin would be how it should be, things like "Hard Forks" wouldn't exists. Miners can't allow them self to not upgrade and mine on a alternative blockchain which makes them lose millions. See more below.
At the SegWit soft fork the Bitcoin Core developers needed at least 95% support from the miners. Without surprise they got 100%. The same result you would get on block size adjusting. They would follow. They have to follow.
Hard Forks don't exists. It just exists because of protecting nodes, who don't do anything, from nothing.
If the block size adjusts and some small nodes hard forks or goes down, nobody should or has to care. It would be even good. The real people who protect and make bitcoin secure, the miners, are up and running.
Hard fork exists because nodes are the ones which has a say in what rules Bitcoin should enforce and thus resulting in older versions of it being incompatible solely because they are enforcing the older rules, miners should not be able to dictate the protocol rules. Without a full node, how do you ensure that miners won't start mining 1000BTC block rewards? Full nodes are the ones enforcing it, you are not validating the block if you are running SPV client. It seems far easier for the miners to just collude and cheat everyone else if people are not able to verify the blocks.
Not all of the entities actually agreed to Segwit in the end, that is why Bitcoin Cash was spawned.
As described in my pre posts, miners can't cheat. If a miner creates a 10000 btc coinbase all the other nodes would reject it. So the miner wasted a lot of time and money for nothing. They wouldn't also create a conspire group to fraud the world. Since anyone can join and also start mining. And you can't spend a 10000btc coinbase output. To nobody and nowhere. Miners are forced to act honest. And If they don't, you would find out immediately, and since the you know who they are and where they they have a very big problem. To just name the most harmless, not a single wallet will connect to them anymore. If you cheat as a miner you go out of business, you don't just lose millions of dollars, you lose everything. You lose also trust and many other things.
As you saw and answered some of my questions in the past I studied a few days SegWit to understand what is. And my final conclusion is its horrible. Bitcoin has already a bad user experience and they dropped something with made everything more complicated. After I read It got started by Blockstream the reason was clear.
The idea behind Bitcoin is being trustless. Only those who can verify the blocks (ie full nodes) are able to verify that the blocks are following the rules as stated. SPV clients do not verify anything; they just follow the longest chain. There is no economic principles in play if you were to centralized mining to that extent; no one else being able to verify the blocks essentially means that everyone has to trust the miners. I'm surprised how your argument went from Bitcoin being easily manipulated by governments through ridiculous policies to making it even easier to manipulate by putting all the power into a small group of miners.
Nodes are what keeps the network secure. Without validating nodes, miners can do anything that they want with no concept of game theory or economic principle.
Everyone on the world can still join the network and try to mine a block. I never said something different. And the miners can't cheat due to all my points listed in my pre post. Miners can't do what they want. They are not able to. This has a lot to do with economics. Its still a P2P network. From person to person. The miner is just securing the network and confirming your transaction.
And again, those node do
nothing.
But if people want to verify small blocks for the rest of your life and get overtaken by other projects, go on.
If you want to support all those points, go on:
- A project which is not bitcoin anymore since a few years but still call them self bitcoin. ITS NOT P2P DIGITAL CASH ANYMORE.
- Want to create a "digital gold" or "store of value" system and a speculative asset.
- Want to support a project where they where more merchants accepting bitcoin in 2014 than now.
- Want to support a project which got infiltrated and overtaken by companies like blockstream and big banks with the goal to keep it weak and make money on things which bitcoin can't .
But you are all free, so it's your choice.
I don't understand why people like Musk and Michael Saylor promote and invest in it. Michael Saylor has a not a single idea what bitcoin is in any aspect and like musk he has a very high self interest.
Not even the ceo of the largest crypto exchange worldwide understands what bitcoin is and is agreeing on every point Michael Saylor is saying. It is NOT digital gold.
Nobody on this world can afford a 14 USD fee. I checked the average tx fee for many months now and its 10-24 USD!! Not a single middle class worker can afford this. Also not a millionaire.
The whole concept of using Bitcoin as digital cash is killed.
Why are people talking about BTC is banking the unbanked?? Lets take a look at country's like India. How should a guy in India with a monthly salary of 230 USD (25% of India) afford a 14 USD fee when making purchases for a few cent for a coffee??
You need huge blocks. And very low transaction fees. Not a cent. Not half of a cent. A 1000th of a cent. Or better a 10000th.
Real nodes (miners) have to be active. So bitcoin can benefit the whole world in every corner of the world.
So know BTC is for traders, speculators, billionaires and 100k a year salary people who invest in bitcoin due to heavy news with probably thinking you need to register with an email to use bitcoin.
I was very exited about Bitcoin Core after reading books from people like Andreas. I knew the technical part. But didn't questioned anything. I accepted the 1MB block size limit. I thought running a node on my home computer would do something. Know I know its not.
But I didn't knew what bitcoin really is about and its true purpose. Well, I thought that time
But I started learning more, studying myself, trying a lot and questioning a lot. Know I'm awake and I know what bitcoin is about and how it has to be done. I also know that millions of people are still sleeping...
BTC is dead to me.
By definition a Node is a miner and nothing else. Its on the original whitepaper:
The steps to run the network are as follows:
1)New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
2)Each node collects new transactions into a block.
3)Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
4)When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
5)Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
6)Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in thechain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.
Again, ASICs didn't exist. One CPU One Vote was Satoshi's idea. Pools didn't exist. Bitcoin was stated as a currency for micropayments. By definition, a full node is one that downloads and validates the entire block. SPV concept was mentioned in the whitepaper as well.
A node is a miner and nothing else.