Quote from: smooth on January 06, 2015, 12:27:55 PM

I haven't read your reddit posts so I can't comment on those.

Well, I see now why you keep claiming that millions of users would revolt.

Quote from: smooth on January 06, 2015, 12:27:55 PM

Actually [the rebel hard fork] 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.

But the easiest and safest way to retain access to one's bitcoins and keep issuing transactions, secured by 99% of the current network power, will be to upgrade to the cartel's version, not to the rebel version.

Quote from: smooth on January 06, 2015, 12:27:55 PM

[ ... ] 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.

Recall that the change made by the rebels is such that the cartel cannot mine their fork. That means that no off-the-shelf mining equipment will be able to mine it either. The rebel network would have to rely on CPU and GPU mining for months, until manufacturers start selling equipment for it.

The value of the BTC money base will be divided into two currencies, cartelBTC and rebelBTC. Every bitcoin owner will start off with equal amounts of both, and can choose to issue transactions in either network, or even in both of them. So their self-interest will not automatically push them to side with the rebels and boycott the cartel.

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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.

The cartel will have nearly 100% of the existing mining equipment working for them. It is the rebels who will have to convince investors to build an EH/s network from scratch.

In that scenario that I described, the "protective improvement" to the protocol would be proposed by the cartel sometime before the next halving. By that time, the network will still be supported by money from the new adopters who buy the coins produced by the miners. Which coins would those new users rather buy: cartelBTCs, that live on the largest network built by man, using (almost) the same protocol designed by Satoshi, wich has been tested for more than 6 years; or rebelBTCs, that live on a small CPU/GPU network, using a radically different protocol that was patched together in three days and has been in used for less than a month?