Quote from: davout on September 02, 2013, 04:03:40 PM

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on September 02, 2013, 03:44:25 PM

Miners don't make the rules, users (the economic majority) do. That's another misconception.

Well, last time I checked it's the miners that were hashing, and therefore making the rules.
Of course without users the whole thing is pointless, but without the miners have fun forking anything.

The users are paying the bills. If miners don't want to mine the fork the users find valuable, the users can find other miners. If the users don't value the fork the miners are mining, the miners are screwed (unless they switch to the valuable fork).

Quote from: davout on September 02, 2013, 04:03:40 PM

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on September 02, 2013, 03:44:25 PM

"What he can gain" is fixed.

That's exactly where you're oversimplifying, because it isn't. If you 51% attack bitcoin, chances are you're going to hurt confidence in the network and therefore the value, thereby changing your expected gain. You're forgetting an important unknown in this equation.

So basically you're chasing a moving target, one for which it's also extremely hard to know whether you're even close to it.

The most plausible attack scenario is by an attacker who wishes to damage or destroy Bitcoin. "You're going to hurt confidence in the network" isn't a complicating factor, it's the whole point of the attack.

But whatever the motivation of the attacker, I'm not analyzing here the timeline of the attack and how much the attacker gains at any point in time, and how it changes due to changes in the network. I'm abstracting it all away and referring to it, as a whole, as "what the attacker has to gain by performing the attack". It's either more than what the attack will cost or not, even if we (or even the attacker) don't know exactly which.

Quote from: davout on September 02, 2013, 04:03:40 PM

I pointed out that even though the question might have a theoretical answer it's not in our reach and therefore not very interesting to pursue any further. Of course, the more hashrate the best, there simply is no way to accurately declare the network to be "secure", or "insecure" without resorting to wild guesses and approximations that make the whole exercise pointless.

I don't want Bitcoin to fail. There is a real problem which could cause it to fail; so I will pursue it until a satisfactory resolution is found, even if I have to deal with uncertainty.

Quote from: davout on September 02, 2013, 04:03:40 PM

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on September 02, 2013, 03:44:25 PM

I said multiple times that I don't know what will happen

Good. So we're on the same page, forgive me but I'm not the kind to dig through histories and I didn't happen to encounter this particular string of words in your previous posts in this thread.

Here you go:

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on September 02, 2013, 02:10:58 PM

Quote from: crumbs on September 02, 2013, 02:00:31 PM

I (honestly) don't understand how the transition from mining-for-bitcoins to mining-for-tx_fees will play out. Sorta' filed it away under "not the time to think about it, will cross that bridge when we get to it." Can anyone walk me through a scenario which results in a responsive & secure network?

Nobody knows exactly how this will happen. But one possibility is that a limit will be placed on the total value that can be transacted per block, and if the resulting network hashrate is perceived to be too low, the limit will be tightened.

I am somebody so if nobody knows, I don't know either.

Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on September 02, 2013, 03:12:41 PM

Then that "something" is exactly what we need to figure out.

If we need to figure it out, it means I don't know what it is.