Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Comparison of Offchain Solutions for Crypto Coins
by
DooMAD
on 10/04/2019, 17:41:03 UTC
I just point out that there is such a spec for the global consensus -  the White Paper

Code did follow after, and need to be on spec & honest - thats how Bitcoin & its consenus works.

You're welcome to express views that your own personal interpretation of the whitepaper doesn't quite match Bitcoin's current direction.  But what you need to remember is that, back when the whitepaper was written, satoshi could not have envisioned the rather obscene pace at which mining effectively became an arms race.  Each time the whitepaper refers to a "node", it actually refers to a miner.  Satoshi's plan was that users would fall into two categories.  Miners and SPV users (just as the whitepaper describes).  Satoshi naturally assumed there would be a far greater number of individuals on the network actively mining, but sadly this was not to be the case.  

The concept of what we currently call a "full node" or a "non-mining node" simply didn't exist when Bitcoin was first created.  Mining became centralised much more quickly than anticipated, so the solution was to offset the power of miners with the balance of non-mining nodes.  This gives ordinary users a voice without requiring them to spend a small fortune on ASICs and, most importantly, preserves decentralisation by making it so that a small number of miners wouldn't be able to act unilaterally and impose changes that users don't want.  

If you're going to make statements about how consensus works when using the whitepaper as your primary source, this is the kind of thing you ideally need to keep in mind.  Things have evolved considerably since 2009 and there's far more nuance to factor in now.  It's not nearly as clear-cut as you might think on first impression.