Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
BitUsher
on 19/04/2016, 12:53:58 UTC

One interesting "benefit" of SegWit was to make people aware that soft forks are actually more dangerous than hard forks.  With SegWit's "extension record" trick, a soft fork can achieve many of the taboo changes that were thought to require a hard fork; such as increasing the block reward (and therefore the 21 million issuance cap) or confiscating coins. As soft forks, those changes would require only the agreement of a mining majority, without the consent of the rest of the community.  However, for that same reason, there is nothing that the community or the developers can do to prevent non-consensual soft forks.

Nobody forces you or anyone to use Core, so yes, you can do something if you don't agree with developers doing what they want. Users are the center of the Bitcoin ecosystem, without users the biggest network of miners is useless.

Not only useless , their ASIC's would have negative utility. Miners are very much beholden to exchanges, users, and merchants. It isn't difficult to slowly introduce a change in the algo and add some temporary checkpoints to prevent their misbehavior.