Quote from: Luke-Jr on May 17, 2016, 09:43:57 PM

Quote from: hdbuck on May 17, 2016, 09:39:51 PM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on May 17, 2016, 07:59:36 PM

Quote from: trashman43 on May 17, 2016, 07:46:10 PM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on May 15, 2016, 09:45:57 PM

Whether we like it or not, Bitcoin simply cannot hardfork while a large part of the community does not consent to it.

how would you even measure how much of the community does consent?

i'm beginning to think a hard fork is completely impossible, except maybe for the narrow scenario where SHA-256, ECDSA or similar are broken.

maybe immutability of consensus is not worth breaking. especially when the best we seem to have to measure it is meaningless miner votes and node counts. fuck a democratic vote, especially ones that can be gamed.

i dont care about miner votes for soft forks. they can do that anyway regardless of anything we do. but for change/removal of consensus rules....no.

The best idea I know of today, would be to have an off-chain stake polling system, where coin-holders can indicate consent by a specially-designed signed message.
Probably we would also need interested parties to fund Google ads and similar to promote awareness of the new polling system, to ensure the majority of UTXOs mark their consent or dissent.
If 99% of polled stake consents to the hardfork, and a sufficient % of UTXO value participates in the polling, it'd probably be safe to move forward.

A safe hardfork can also be done which leaves old nodes "locked" rather than vulnerable to attack.
This protects any nodes that neglect/forget to upgrade in time, and can be designed such that if they really want to dissent too late, they can add a simple one-liner to bypass the "lock-out".

Sounds awesome, but remember one of the key point of cypherpunk bitcoin is "privacy". Nobody should be forced to take part in some political public demonstration. Besides, involving google?! wtf man. Why not directly mark the bagholders with some veal blood already?

Also, at what threshold do you consider the "polled stake" view (which may be as high as 99%!! omg) to overcome the whole bitcoins at stake?

Well, the stake poll would be entirely based on the signed messages, so it wouldn't reveal who owns the UTXOs at all.
Admittedly, there might be a privacy concern if you're already de-pseudonymised, but I don't know that there's even a hypothetical way to solve that.

I don't know any way to reach the entire community, and Google ads seems like a reasonable attempt.
It seems like BitcoinTalk and reddit only make up a tiny fraction of people using bitcoins.

I don't understand your last question.

Point is there is none. Nobody can ever know nor force anyone to participate in some democracy meme for any other reason than security (such as some encryption broken hardfix, which would require neither a vote nor google ads)

re: my last question: what fraction of the total bitcoin's marketcap stake should the "99% polled stake" be considered enough to commit hardfork?

edit:

Quote from: beautyon_

Bitcoin, by design, is not democratic. No matter how many times you try and assert that it is, it is not, and it never will be. And it is also not socialist.
Removing all of the fascinating, revolutionary technical details, the core of Bitcoin is that it is voluntary and the transactions and ledger entries made with it are mediated by a computer programme.

You choose, as a free human being, to download the required software, use Bitcoin and be bound by the neworks fixed rules.

Finally, Bitcoin doesnt care what you think. It doesnt care about anything. What you think doesnt matter; that is the ultimate power of Bitcoin.
The Blockchain is like a force of nature.
You must conform to ethical standards of behaviour in the Blockchain organized world, or starve, since the option of violence is taken off of the table.
The implications of all of this will only become clear once it is too late for the democracy lovers to stop it, who will be left scratching their heads wondering what happened, why democracy died, and crucially, why everything has not fallen apart

https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-is-not-democratic-81f87158250a#.ug1x7grh9

Imho you're beating a dead horse here with the vote thing. Why not move on?

Be free of your 'responsabilises' and roundtable's 'engagement'. Let it be.