Quote from: JorgeStolfi on January 06, 2015, 11:02:03 AM

Quote from: smooth on January 06, 2015, 04:19:25 AM

If a cartel of miners tried to block all transactions, there would be code for a hard fork within 3 hours making some trivial change to the PoW that rendered the current mining industry worthless and the hard fork itself would probably happen within a few days. And then life would continue on as usual, except that the next set of miners would know how suicidal such a move would be (and on a more contemplative schedule further changes would be made).

So, according to that post, the cartel cannot force the users to do a compatible change the protocol because the users who do not want any change to the original protocol would immediately agree to make an incompatible change to the protocol. Makes sense...

Read the bold portion (which was quoted from your earlier post) and try again.

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That hard fork would of course prevent *all* existing miners, including the faithful ones, from working on the 'born-again orthodox' chain. That chain would be no different from any other junk altcoin with a tiny CPU-based network.

Actually it would be quite different from a junk altcoin because it would have the support of a few million bitcoin users and all of the rest of the economy that actually wants transactions to happen. Junk altcoins have tiny networks and are insecure because there is no value to motivate mining. That would not be the case with a bitcoin hard fork done in response to miner misbehavior. It would retain at least a large portion of the value of bitcoin (some value loss would likely occur, at least temporarily, in this "war" scenario), and therefore would attract a large and strong mining network. It can't be any other way with thousands of dollars up for grabs every ten minutes.

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The cartel probably would have enough money to rent cloud computing and jam that rebel bitcoin chain too.

Unlikely, they would be too busy explaining to their investors why their stupidity just blew up a few hundred million dollars or more of the investors' money. I highly doubt that cartel would find itself awash in new funding.

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Even if the rebel fork survives, it will in time see its mining get centralized again. That is, users may escape from *that* cartel, but not from the centralization of mining itself.

You are still missing the point. Some degree of centralization does not give miners absolute power. Miners are participants in the overall economy certainly, significant ones, and it stands to reason they would have some influence, but not the ability to make demands under threat of stopping all transactions.

I haven't read your reddit posts and I'm not particularly interested in doing so until you demonstrate at least the ability to make a logical argument without changing your premise mid-stream, so I can't comment on those.