Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Do miners really think destroying Bitcoin will make them rich?
by
dinofelis
on 24/03/2017, 06:19:10 UTC
If you look at the way things are going now, you might realize that miners have lost the plot. They are sabotaging the whole Bitcoin experiment, because they want to make more profit and if they cannot do this, they will attack the minority chain to achieve their goal.

You should have had a look what happened with the ETH/ETC split.  You don't know what "miners want".  You just hear some vocal people say a lot of things, but are they the official "representative" of the miner cartel ?  People were also claiming that miners were going to attack the minority chain ETC.  It didn't happen.  Miners want to make profit, period.  They don't waste their precious hash power on war games that profit THEIR PEERS.

The only thing that is happening, is that miners are essentially quite happy with the current form of bitcoin, it brings them guaranteed fees in the future, and don't want this to be MODIFIED seriously.  Core has decided to force a modification upon them which would take the essence of the fees to another layer.  THIS is what miners don't want.  So they will side with anybody who helps them stop these modifications.  They want immutability, because it suits them.  Immutability was what bitcoin was designed for.  Bitcoin is what it is, and will not change if that change is against the interests of a part of the community.  That was the whole idea.  Only (technical) changes that don't matter for people's situation can eventually be implemented. 

Bitcoin's immutability mechanism is at full steam, and is protecting the protocol from any changes.  It is all that is happening.  Nothing more.  Bitcoin is what it is, and will remain what it is.

Note that deep down, miners wouldn't mind bigger blocks right now, as their income is still mainly block reward.  They are thinking after the next halving.  Sooner or later (bitcoin's fundamental design) fees will have to replace block reward.  That can only happen if transactions are scarce.  So transactions HAVE TO BE SCARCE FOR BITCOIN TO FUNCTION in the long run.
That was in the system since the beginning, but as long as there were big block rewards, people weren't thinking of that.  The last block halving has signalled the beginning of the end of that period when transactions were cheap.  Now, they have to become expensive to pay for PoW.