Quote from: madjules007 on February 09, 2016, 05:37:36 AM

Quote from: jonald_fyookball on February 09, 2016, 04:24:45 AM

Quote from: madjules007 on February 08, 2016, 05:51:55 PM

Quote from: jonald_fyookball on February 08, 2016, 03:59:57 PM

Quote from: gmaxwell on February 07, 2016, 10:20:42 PM

Quote from: Lauda on February 07, 2016, 05:22:22 PM

there is no HF without them at all regardless of how many people switch.

Hardforks are orthogonal with miners. If a miner is not complying with the rules of the network, then as far as the network is concerned they simply aren't miners. It was "classic"'s choice to gate their hardfork on miner support-- perhaps not a bad choice (though 75% is pretty much the worst possible threshold)-- but no force of nature made them do that.

The best reason for classic to use mining support as the trigger is, I believe, because most of the support for it is substantially fabrication and they believe it will be easy to trick the small number of miners needed to reach 75%, and by taking away 3/4 of the network hash-power they hope to coerce the users of Bitcoin to follow along. I think they greatly underestimate miners and the users of Bitcoin.

"Trick the miners"?

Oh you can't be serious. Do you believe
miners aren't capable of making a rational
decision whether they want to support
2MB blocks or not?

As far as miners coercing users, I feel
this is a disingenuous argument. Miners
can't meaningfully exist without users.
If miners did something entirely unreasonable,
no one would use their coin. Users are free
to support the network that they feel offers
the greatest overall value, not necessarily just
the highest hashing rate.

In regards to my own posts above (I'll let gmaxwell speak for himself), it wasn't about whether miners are capable of being rational Roll Eyes

-- the implication was that a small group of highly centralized pool operators are easy to persuade to do what you want (in hopes that they will influence node operators). That's much easier than persuading thousands of node operators to do what you want. And that's the great danger of a contentious hard fork. Getting a majority of miners to temporarily point their hash power somewhere is much simpler than getting the majority of node operators to upgrade their software, particularly when the consensus rule changes it makes are controversial.

Maybe you should speak for gmax actually. Lol. Your point is very clear!

OK I get it and I agree that's a possibility.

However its not necessarily a high probability
that miners will get tricked in such a manner.

If it does unfold that way, well I guess
that would be the karma of not satisfying
the community's reasonable request for
2MB.

I wouldn't view it that way. I'd view it as karma for pushing the community to break consensus. I strongly believe that rule changes, due to the irreparable nature of chain forks, should be done with extreme caution. The mob rule approach of XT and Classic push the hard fork as quickly as possible, without acknowledging the danger of a hard fork when there is no consensus on the new rules among either miners, or nodes.

At 75% activation threshold, you say it is not necessarily a high probability -- I respect your opinion. But I disagree. And I can't imagine being able to justify the risk.

We basically agree.

To clarify though I'm not saying getting 75% is low probability. I'm saying getting 75% and most individual miners not understanding what's going on, is low probability.

Although caution should be exercised, I don't think it means the community should just acquiesce to the status quo and avoid rocking the boat at any cost.