Quote from: Lauda on March 18, 2017, 02:19:10 PM

Quote from: dinofelis on March 18, 2017, 01:47:37 PM

Exercise:
1) suppose ALL miners agree upon 4 MB blocks, even though all users want to have 1 MB blocks. The miners only make one chain, with 4 MB blocks. What are users and nodes, including exchanges, going to do ?

Emergency hard fork PoW change -> all miners are fired and all their gear is effectively useless.

No, of course not. If you change the PoW algorithm, for instance, you implement Scrypt, you simply make an altcoin with a bidirectional hard fork.

You make a NEW POPULATION OF MINERS.

Both coins will be on the market now, one with a SHA256 hash and one with a Scrypt hash. The market will now decide how the market cap will be divided over both coins.

If it is true that the users prefer the new coin, then indeed, the former miners will be on a worthless chain. But we now have simply a NEW miner population.

Note that the nodes didn't count for zilch in this transition. It was a new miner population on a hard fork that was taking over, not nodes. But the USERS decided in the market.

However, think of this. The new miner population will be running at low difficulty, because there's not much hash power available for Scrypt. The security of the new chain will be miles below the security of the old chain, and the new scrypt miners will make a fortune, with small gear, reaping in high rewards.

So it isn't guaranteed that the users will make the switch. Hell, if they wanted to, they could have exchanged their bitcoin for litecoin right away, because this other coin already exists !!

So this "take over" is far from guaranteed to succeed, and in any case, it is then a battle between two miner populations, and NODES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.

There where it gets trickier, and might be an outcome for bitcoin, is if one launched a proof-of-stake version of bitcoin. A hard fork that uses proof of stake instead of proof of work. Like ethereum plans to do.

At a certain point, you don't care any more about any miner, because there's no mining any more. In fact, just any person could launch a proof-of-stake version of bitcoin. If the code is available, people can install this. But again, it is a hard fork and will be decided in the market.

This might actually be a good idea: to make a proof-of-stake version of bitcoin. But it will just be an alt coin. Will people switch entirely to it in the market ? Highly doubtfull too. But at least, with proof of stake, there is no miner war any more: the consensus is this time determined by the stake holders, and not by a separate interest group.

In that case, nodes become slightly more important, because stake holders have also to keep their nodes running to mint blocks. This might be an idea. But it won't catch on, I'm sure. Because it would be an alt coin, and would not carry the brand of bitcoin.

Forking off bitcoin is something that I'm surprised is not done more for altcoin makers. I would never start a new genesis block if I wanted to make an alt coin, I would fork off bitcoin, eventually with a special forking bloc giving me some premine.

So, conclusion:
in any case, nobody "forced bitcoin" to do what ever because nodes decided so. At best, an altcoin is forked off from bitcoin which has such a big success in the market that it completely overtakes bitcoin, but that is already possible right now: if people want 4 times more room and another algorithm: litecoin is already in the market (note that it has segwit ready to be activated too, but it is not catching on there either).

And if people really are fed up with miners, they can fork off a proof-of-stake coin, but, hey, if ethereum does the same, why not simply buy ethereum ? Or peercoin, for that matter ?

So that's visibly not what people really really want and in any case, it is an alt coin that is made NEXT TO BITCOIN.