Topic: Why do some people believe that only the nodes miners run matter? - page 2. (Read 4740 times)

I think this is what it boils down to. The economic majority.

Even if enough miners where to collude as to attempt a SegWit rollback hardfork, I simply do not see the rest of the ecosystem to play along. Or at least I have yet to read a convincing argument of why the market would decide for the rollback blockchain (ie. the one you are referring to as Satoshi blockchain) over the currently canonical Bitcoin blockchain (ie. the one you are refererring to as Core).

In other words, it all stands and falls with the economic majority, not with what the miners decide to do. All the SegWit booty in the world won't help if no one's willing to buy. Hence there's a real economic cost in attempting such an coup. Hence it's more than just "the flick of a switch" that you make it out to be. (Holistically speaking. False signalling and changing software is trivial, of course, but I presume that lies not at the heart of your argument)

SegWit signalling aside, it is still a fact that actual SegWit nodes do honor SegWit transactions like they would honor legacy transactions. I mean that's pretty much the definition of a SegWit node.

It is also worth noting that a SegWit rollback hardfork (ie. back to legacy nodes that interpret SegWit transactions as ANYONECANPAY) requires either (a) literally all miners including the majority of non-mining nodes to collude, or (b) if full miner control can't be achieved, enough hashpower to both force the SegWit rollback while keeping the SegWit blockchain in lockdown with a 51% attack.

While I understand you firmly believe in a SegWit reckoning happening it is still pretty close to impossible to pull off. And that has nothing to do with lying our trying push an agenda.



Yes, as it's SegWit transactions that make the advantage covert AsicBoost moot it likely still works in Bitcoin Cash. So if Bitmain was using covert AsicBoost (afaik this was never conclusively proven?) they indeed had a strong interest in trying to prevent SegWit from being activated on mainnet.

I found a simplified explanation of why covert AsicBoost is thwarted by SegWit transactions here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56514/how-does-segwit-prevent-asicboost

I tried to understand all the technical posts you made but let me tell you, this is when my instincts started telling me to stop listening and wear my tinfoil hat on. You remind me of franky1. Hahaha.

You can be a paid propagandist of Roger Ver.


Sorry about your health. I hope you get well. Take care of yourself.

Thanks. That proves my first thought that he might be a person that I should not listen to.

Plus I believe BIP148 and NO2X showed Jihan Wu who's boss. It is also the reason why he supported Roger Ver's call to hard fork to Bitcoin Cash. To "own" a network they can control.

Does covert AsicBoost still work in Bitcoin Cash?


But in truth non-mining full nodes are not irrelevant. The miners, users, merchants, services, the economic majority are all relevant in the network. NO2X proved it.

Only pre-Segwit nodes (about 2% of the network, none of which are miners) interpret Segwit tx's as ANYONECANPAY. It's the soft-forking logic that keeps pre-Segwit nodes from rejecting Segwit blocks, every other node (the other 98%) knows that Segwit transactions need a valid signature (hence why 95% of miners was the activation threshold for Segwit). Remember how it got activated: miners essentially began to threaten each other with orphaning non-Segwit signalling blocks to force the others to enforce the Segwit soft fork. But apparently, according to your logic, miners will wait until Segwit addresses are in majority use, then roll back the Segwit soft fork and steal everyone's BTC, mwuhahahhahaha!

Here's a little issue with your theory: Segwit buried deployment, which maintains Segwit's activation since block number 1.

And there's always going to be enough independent miners to keep the chain going from attack block -1, any miners contemplating such an attack know this in advance. So it's not a functional attack at all, and certainly won't be after Segwit deployment is permanently enforced.



This is last year's FUD, and you've been forced to scrape this one up off the floor after the biggest clown trolls in existence barfed it up when they couldn't get it to stick.

You've not got much imagination, your only gift seems to be that you believe if you can just keep talking, then everyone will accept your babbling. But what happens in reality? You stop talking

And miners were signalling for NYA because...?  They clearly desired more blockspace for more fee-paying transactions.  Just about every single argument you've ever made on this board would only make sense if you don't live in reality.  You can't rationally argue that miners want a 1MB blocksize when we've seen demonstrably that they wanted larger blocksizes.  The fact they didn't get their first preference of the "2x" proposal is evidence enough that the non-mining nodes still hold ample economic sway over network governance.  We all saw it play out.  We got a compromise in the form of SegWit, which most of the miners and users accepted.  Those that didn't accept it have the option of BCH.  That's what happened in the real world.  Nothing in your fantasy world of make believe is going to happen.  You are a renowned kook.  Get your meds adjusted.  Come back when you're not having some sort of perpetual paranoid-psychotic episode.



The entirely fictitious miners that only exist in your head?  The ones that act in a manner wholly contrary to their own future success and longevity?  Tell them the real world says hi for me.



Except it doesn't enable theft.  The game theory was all done before the code was even written.  Read the whitepaper again:

"The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest.  If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."

The Schelling point of pay-to-anyone non-immutability doesn't change this incentive to remain honest.  If it did, SegWit never would have been devised, let alone implemented.  Again, no amount of telling us "but look how many bitcoins they could steal" is going to change the fact that doing so would seriously impact the value of those bitcoins going forwards.  The wealthy won't be wealthy anymore if they lose their shirts in the attack.



Ah, you've been drinking the MP kool-aid.  Not surprising that he attracts your ilk.  The mentally unhinged always rally around MP's deranged war-cries.  I can't take anyone who references or quotes his gutter-spiel seriously.  

Annoymint is essentially saying that the miners can follow any rules they like, the users must follow their choice of consensus rules. Which isn't what's happening in reality of course, but it's a clever argument nonetheless.

Any comments on how your sudden reappearance in the Bitcoin world is coinciding with other general market FUD, Annoymint? Oh, and please tell us about the latest developments in your satanism-resistant cryptocurrency, I'm really, really interested What's new since when you started ? (we've been waiting to hear even a little news about your big plans since... what, 2013?)

Miners can't replace a proper organic array of full validating nodes, namely, nodes which are hosted by people all over the planet which never meet each other and have unknown agendas. A network with 10000 nodes run by 1 miner is weaker than 1000 nodes run by legit people all over the planet, making actual transactions, part of all the exchanges and services using said software etc.

If X miners collide to steal SegWit, im sure Y miners will find profit in not doing so out of the mere short sighted evil act of the SegWit booty (the Schelling point is not so clear to me here, thinking long term), the other will go for a PoW change if needed. So with the 95% of the community supporting the software behind SegWit (most people support Core like it or not, no one is forcing people to run Core software mostly) supporting that, with the developers supporting that, it will only need the approval of merchants and exchanges, and people means fees. At this point is dishonest miners vs everyone else, and I don't think nobody is going to support dishonest miners just like nobody would congratulate miners in how much of a good job they did on a regular 51% attack because it would damage their brand/status, people tend to ostracize these miners which is part of how Bitcoin works, so no one will list the attacked BTC chain as BTC and the current SegWit chain (with a PoW change if needed) will be known as BTC all over the world, with miners on attacked chain circlejerking alone and nobody transacting on it because there's no way in hell anyone is going to be on board with a 3-year rollback, this will set an example on how it's a bad idea to do that ever again even if theoretically possible. Just another outcome.

You'll have to be more specific now that you've written about the Schelling point in every single post you've made in this thread.  Do you mean the first utterance under the Traxo alt?  Or one of the other multitude of uses?



LTC at $13, BCH for free from the fork.  Doing just fine, thanks.  Not sure what relevance that has.



You can't replace legitimate network traffic, actual real-world commercial activity, with miners running some extra nodes.  That's not where the utility or network effects come from.  Having access to specialised hardware doesn't magically maintain an economy all by itself.  The people who generally feel the need to have a "real-time objective view of the network" are the ones who contribute an above average proportion of that real-world commercial activity and they don't want to rely on others to know for certain that everything is valid.  Everyone paying a fee for their transaction is economically relevant.  The network won't survive over the long term if people aren't transacting.  It's likely that people and businesses running full nodes account for a large proportion of Bitcoin's fee-paying traffic.  You can't describe them as expendable or replaceable.  Bitcoin needs those users.  It needs more users if it really is to become a global reserve currency.  Which is why scaling is necessary.  

Think your game theory through to conclusion.  If the only people transacting on the network were people running specialised hardware, Bitcoin would have far less functionality and adoption than it currently has.  It would no longer be accepted by vendors if the network only had a small number of active participants who used it solely as a store of value.  It would no longer be accepted anywhere if people didn't believe it was secure because miners had stolen SegWit balances.  No one would even think of it as a store of value if we set the precedent that stealing balances was somehow okay merely because the wealthy would deem it morally acceptable and therefore that means everyone would agree.  That's beyond a stretch.

Again, you are advocating a system where theft is commonplace, but still somehow held value and utility.  No amount of theoretical manoeuvrings will ever make that a reality.  What other "global reserve currency" can you name that only circulates amongst people running specialised hardware?  There isn't one.  You can't have a reserve currency if no one believes it has any value.  No one would believe it has value if balances could be stolen or transactions could be tampered with due to hashrate attacks being viable.  Ergo, they aren't viable.  Because Pyrrhic victory.

If there were a UASF Bitcoin with no miners and just users, that would be a weak Bitcoin.  I'm pretty sure we agree on that point.  
If there were a SegWit-theft Bitcoin with no users and just miners, that would also be a weak Bitcoin.  Why can't you grasp that simple fact?

There's a balance of influence/control/power/call it what you will between devs, users and miners.  All three are needed keep Bitcoin strong.  You can't discard any of them without consequence.

I found this blog by StopAndDecrypt, https://hackernoon.com/bitcoin-miners-beware-invalid-blocks-need-not-apply-51c293ee278b

It says the same thing of what I have been thinking, that running full nodes do matter because they validate transactions and blocks and check that they are following the rules. The same in my thoughts of its importance with censorship resistance.

Anunymint, I will quote the "on topic" parts of the blog and leave it to you to reply.

but the basic reason people want to run their own node is trust. Your own node can validate all transactions. If you rely on other peoples nodes then you are putting trust in them to validate transactions on your behalf. ,,,

I hope the wealthy are as monumentally ignorant as you are when they carry out this supposedly inevitable feat of pure magic that defies all conventional rationale.  Since, if they have a clue in their head, they aren't going to bother.  

I love how you keep saying "Schelling point" in an attempt to make yourself look more intelligent than you are (hint:  it's not working).  

Also "[50+%]" is still grossly inaccurate as it's possible to pull off with 49% or even less.  We'll add that to the growing list of things you've demonstrated you haven't "grokked" about Bitcoin.  Just call it a "hashpower attack" (or better yet, shut up completely until you can talk sense).



Yes, just like all the other times in the past when we've observed your flair for the dramatic.  All your other "end is nigh" prognostications were wrong too.  You've attempted at least a dozen other post-mortems while the patient is still alive and kicking.

And then the miners can transact amongst themselves.  Just them.  Alone.  If a successful attack occurred, who else would want to be on a network run by thieves?  Pyrrhic victory.  Devastating to the attacker.  As the block reward diminishes over time, miners will become more and more reliant on the transaction fees.  They need the other network participants for their efforts to remain fruitful.  Repeat yourself or don't, it doesn't matter.  You're still talking crap.  Miners are not the economic majority.  They don't provide the overwhelming transaction volume that will ultimately sustain the network.  Block rewards are finite.  Part of the design.  You should probably try to grasp at least a vague understanding of that before you attempt any further statements about how all this works.



Not all of the wealthy participants are miners.  If these users are stolen from, they won't store their wealth in Bitcoin anymore.  I can't understand why this point isn't glaringly obvious to you.  I fully understand the point you think you're making.  I'm just telling you that the premise is fundamentally flawed.  You're talking about a network where miners can steal what they want and there would be literally no consequences.  That somehow other network users would think that's just fine and dandy and continue transacting and storing their wealth in Bitcoin like nothing had happened.  That, in this bizarro-world of yours, rampant theft of property was totally okay and no one would care in the slightest.  It doesn't matter how tempting the "score" might be, theft will not be tolerated in Bitcoin.  Miners understand this.  Apparently you don't.

You've given some highly entertaining Chicken Little "sky is falling" tirades before, but even by your standards this is impressive.



Except that I clearly do fully grasp the fact that, in a theoretical 51% attack, SegWit balances are more vulnerable than non-SegWit balances.  It doesn't mean a 51% attack is more likely, though.  However profitable the attack might seem at first glance.  Unless miners have grown tired of accumulating usable coins that have value in the real world and would rather we left them to trade their completely worthless thief-tokens amongst themselves.  Tokens that would no longer be redeemable in the real world because, again, Bitcoin would be finished if a successful attack occurred.  No more top spot in the cryptoverse.  It would just be another generic cryptocurrency that merchants don't accept for their goods and services because it isn't secure.  They'd move on to something that was secure.  Whatever that "something" is will be the new #1 coin.  Chances are, the miners' hardware won't be very useful for that new coin everyone uses.  Again, a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin is a wholly Pyrrhic victory.  It destroys everything that gives Bitcoin its value.  No amount of telling us "but look how many bitcoins they could steal" is going to change the fact that it would seriously impact the value of those bitcoins.



Your position is logically untenable.  Bitcoin can't be the most secure network if miners are stealing money.  That's not the definition of secure.  Try looking the word up.  No amount of accusing people of failing to understand you (because you're so unbelievably pompous to think it impossible that other mere mortals might be on your level) will change the fact that your argument is flawed.  It's undeniable that the alignment of incentives is an integral part of the security.  Bitcoin was specifically designed to make it unprofitable to attack the network.  That's what makes it secure.  Miners won't steal the money because it would demonstrably prove Bitcoin is not secure, thus it would lose its value and the miners would be left holding some near-worthless tokens and some very expensive space-heaters.  That's not a win for them, that's shooting themselves in the foot head.  Financial suicide.

To summarise, if value is derived from security, you can't attack security without simultaneously attacking value.  Repeat whatever nonsense you want, you can't refute that.

Then it's a good thing we don't have Democracy in Bitcoin.  We have consensus, which is better.

Democracy is a sham, since all that really matters is lobbying and bribery.  Those with the money make the rules and the people merely vote for the puppets that dance along.  Bitcoin has a strong immunity to such corruption.  People aren't just casting a vote, they're actively participating.  And the chances of lobbying ever being an issue in Bitcoin are further reduced with every new participant.  UASF is a bit of a joke because some people believe that non-mining nodes inherently have more power or influence than mining ones.  Clearly that's wrong.  But at the same time, mining nodes don't have more power or influence than non-mining ones.  Neither would be able to make a secure chain without the other.



Another reason why the proposed UASF to activate SegWit would have been utterly moronic had they gone ahead, because they would be voluntarily sacrificing the security provided by the hashrate.  But, provided the network doesn't split in a mining-versus-non-mining-node style of confrontation, the miners, in turn, rely on the "security" of the economic majority.  Hence why the mining nodes don't hold more influence than the non-mining ones.  They need each other.  Consider seriously the implications of a successfully executed (yet poorly named) "51% attack" on Bitcoin.  SegWit user or not, few people are going to stick around if that sort of behaviour was deemed a normal occurrence.  You can't attack the network in that way without harming yourself financially.  You would be attacking the source of your own income.  Biting the very hand that feeds.  Not a smart move.

Crapcoins like BTG can probably limp on after an attack like that, since the "value proposition" (and I mean that in the very loosest sense of the words) is purely speculative.  The bagholders will simply brush that incident under the carpet and whistle nonchalantly, hoping some fresh-meat-to-the-grinder speculator will come along to take their place.  But Bitcoin isn't a crapcoin.  There's a difference between a speculator who is only here to make a buck, compared to those who are primarily involved because they appreciate the ethos and principles behind crypto.  Those users wouldn't deem that sort of attack admissible here.  They would rather accept a successful attack as a failure of the experiment, wash their hands of Bitcoin completely and build something new from the ground up.  

A 51% attack (can someone please think up a more accurate name?) on SegWit or Bitcoin is the end of Bitcoin.  All that would be left after that are the speculators.  The majority of people who run full nodes are not the speculators.  Those who contribute code are not the speculators.  The users who most actively transact over the network are not the speculators.  The ones who provide the real economic impetus that gives Bitcoin its top spot in the cryptoverse are not the speculators.  

The value proposition of Bitcoin is that the network is transparent, neutral and that everyone owns what they own, with no centralised power to block, reverse or otherwise tamper with any transaction.  If you jeapordise that in any way, lots of incredibly expensive mining hardware suddenly fails to make ROI by a significant margin and things start to go downhill very quickly for those who own that hardware.



So you can see why any collapse of that security would mean that Bitcoin loses its value.  You've just countered your own argument.  Well done.

Censorship resistance, I think, is built on the rational mining incentive, not users running full nodes. Miners are incentivized to publish any/all transactions they can based on fee priority, because of the block reward. That's what keeps them from censoring any given transaction -- fees.

The problem with SPV wallets (aside from privacy) is that users can't know if a payment they receive is valid. Whether a payment they send is censored by the mining network is a separate issue entirely.


Sure they can. A malicious group of miners just needs enough hash power to orphan any blocks that contain your transaction from the best chain.


I believe this is correct. Non-mining nodes don't really participate in the consensus process. They merely validate what miners do.

But the existence of validating non-mining nodes is a powerful check on miners, since a robust network of full nodes will reject attempts at dishonest mining that break consensus rules. "Reject" isn't even the right word; they'll be completely ignorant of the invalid forks because they are incompatible protocols. Major economic nodes like exchanges are especially relevant here, because they won't risk accepting invalid coins from miners, which presumably keeps miners in line.

If a miner breaks consensus with economically relevant nodes, his future block rewards may end up worthless. That's a strong incentive not to break consensus.


Many people predicted that would happen when Bcash forked. Instead, Bcash had to hard fork a second time because of slow block times.

Apparently, there wasn't enough incentive amongst miners to risk attacking Bitcoin. What makes you think that incentive will ever emerge?


For various reasons (like massive ventures with significant required infrastructure and high electricity costs), industrial miners are not anonymous. As Peter Todd points out, colluding and openly attacking the network could bring significant bad PR or even criminal charges.

Segwit transactions represent 1/3 of the network. You think when 1/3 of the network has their outputs stolen, that all users are just going to quietly eat the losses? They'll download the miners' client and start following the miners' chain? Why?

UASFs / hard forks to address such miner attacks may be extremely inefficient. However, it doesn't follow that most users will remain on a network where the majority of miners have participated in thefts of this magnitude against its users. And those "other miners" you mention? They need to weigh their long term rational interest in a healthy network against the short term incentive of "free money."

This brings me back to the rational mining incentive I mentioned earlier. In your scenario, that incentive has blatantly failed. There's no point in switching networks to follow the miner chain if there is apparently no reliable incentive to keep miners honest. If that's the case, Bitcoin's value should plummet and this whole conversation is moot. (And that's the overarching reason why miners will probably avoid ever engaging in the sort of attack, unless at the behest of a powerful nation-state)

I also read that in case of a successful 51% attack, there is nothing a miner can do except censor a transaction. I have not studied the details but that is also relevant to the topic, or might be a good new topic. I am confused now. There's too many details to discuss.

Anonymint, give me time to digests your posts. Hahaha.

Plus I found this. Satoshi's "original vision" included non-mining nodes as a security measure.

The "steal all the segwit" chain would be absolutely worthless. The markets will most likely be frozen before the bad actor can close their short positions. Even if the bad actor was fast, it is highly doubtful that the bad actor will be able to recoup his costs for this 10+ month chain reorganization he will be attempting, especially in this relatively illiquid market. Also, if the bad actor's intent was to absolutely destroy Bitcoin, that will not come to fruition either. I would see an emergency hardfork in the works. I really doubt any entity is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try and implement a "steal the segwit" 51% attack. Also, I doubt that the attacker is somehow going to make his chain plausible by trying to bribe people to accept it. How many billions is that going to cost?  

the longest valid chain is valid. 51% attack cannot be stopped without an hardfork. We can only pray that 51% is not and will never be profitable on bitcoin. A successful 51% attack on bitcoin will provoke a panic sell and the attack will be stopped because it is no more profitable.
if the attack persist after the panic sell, bye bye cryptocurrencies. It was a funny experiment.

When the network realises the attack, then it would be too late. 51% attacks are essentially an attacker building their own private chain alongside the honest chain. When the time is ripe, they will release the chain and the history of the other chain would essentially be wiped clean.

Nodes can't reject blocks as they wish, unfortunately. They could invalidate the chain but it would have to be done manually and the client would probably have to be modified. The attack can continue after the release of the chain too, as long as they can sustain 51% of the hashrate.

Assuming that a 51% attack was successful. But when the network starts noticing that there's a "bad actor" in the network, won't the nodes start rejecting blocks from him?


"One-CPU-one vote" in his paper, Satoshi did not expect miningpools to take over. Originally it was intended that every user of full nodes particiates in maintaining the Blockchain by giving some of her CPU-power to the network and earning a reward for it. Today we have a mining industry that has no interest in the coin what so ever as long as they make profit from it. They don't even have to use the coin at all for anything else but to sell the reward for their profit.

Other protocols like PoS are more close to Satoshi's orignial intend, where everyone who has a wallet open stakes a part of their coins to keep the Blockchain running and by attacking the Blockchain they risk losing their own investment they have in the coin.