Quote from: YarkoL on January 28, 2016, 10:04:25 AM

that is equivalent to saying that the user community is just plain stupid

I think that's a naive perspective. Consider, Peter_R was making news some time back circulating an academic style paper arguing that a fee market exists absent any blocksize limit. But his analysis depends deeply on there being continued inflation, and does not work without it. If we drive the system into a state where the choice is to take a _bit_ of inflation or else suffer a debilitating loss of security the answer will be obvious, and it doesn't require anyone being stupid. Avoiding that kind of trap requires constant vigilance and foresight to avoid creating that trap in the first place.

This is doubly true given that many of the arguments are fully general: People argue that somehow without mechenisms in the system miners will collectively self-regulate and behave in a way that achieves a globally good outcome, absent security assumption breaking collusion or coercive force, even when it's in their individual best interest to defect; because they want Bitcoin to be valuable. This could just as well be applied to them controlling inflation; and people keep making it even though that kind of strongly trusting long term benevolence against short term interests already been disproved by finney attacks, withholding and dos attacks on pools by each other, voluntarily centralization in response to orphaning, and many other effects which the system survives precisely because it doesn't trust miners and is instead built out of rules that limit the amount of harm that mistakes or greed can cause, without requiring an external collusion which could easily be abused (including via violent threat) to censor transactions or perform other harmful acts.

I don't think users are stupid. I think governance is incredibly hard and that the development history of fiat currencies shows that mankind is ill-equip to create a strong and sound system via human governance-- not through lack of trying, but because mankind is fundamentally not cut out for it: there is always some excuse that makes people feel justified in compromising the property rights of some for the benefit of (potentially many) others. Bitcoin was specifically created and promoted to replace that kind of subjectivity with machines, but it can't do it if we go around undermining it. ... Does that mean I think Bitcoin can never be hardforked? Absolutely not! Some kinds of hardforks would be completely uncontroversial; it's the ones that have earnest opposition from real owners of Bitcoin that such great care needs to be taken with.

[Also-- witness Bitcoin Classic arguing that it's proper to put the 21m cap up to a popular vote. I think that is reprehensible. A simple majority shouldn't just be able to vote to undermine the property rights of a minority, even if there a strongly fair global voting mechanism were possible.

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Even if you don't buy my argument that the risk is real; the argument that Bitcoin could easily have its rules changed is FUD that our competition would ruthlessly exploit. After all, this is an earnest concern held by many of the longest term and most experienced among us... it would be an easy sell to someone looking for "the catch".