Quote from: rpietila on April 28, 2014, 08:07:52 PM

Quote from: benjyz on April 28, 2014, 07:56:11 PM

Quote from: rpietila on April 28, 2014, 07:32:48 PM

If the coin creation method is changed, the ASIC owners have nothing to say.

Bitcoin uses proof-of-work, and therefore the majority of the hashing power decides. Why would the current stake-holders be so stupid to switch to a system which is unproven and where there economic advantages, i.e. their capital investment becomes worthless? That makes no sense whatsoever. Coin creation in Bitcoin doesn't arbitrarily change. That's why its a solid system. If such changes were possible Bitcoins would be worthless. All of this should be obvious to anyone who wants to understand why Bitcoin works.

It is precisely BECAUSE of what you described that if any PoS would ever be implemented by anyone based on Bitcoin blockchain, it will be a fork, or an altcoin, and not Bitcoin. And therefore you and all of the ASIC miners will have no say in the process, because it has new rules.

If people see that the intruder is gaining in value and Bitcoin is losing it, they may try to get extra share of the new coins by selling their Bitcoins, hastening their demise. The original Bitcoin proponents will only lose, though, if they have sold the spinoff, thinking that it is worth nothing.

With the exception of certain full nodes in the P2Pool, existing ASIC miners do not participate in the Bitcoin network. They provide shares of hashing power to their respective pools in return for daily payouts. My pitch for Bitcoin 1.0 would be to the pools who could retain a lot more of the $500 million passing through their hands each year. There are only 12 or so to persuade. There are about 7300 other full nodes that verify the blockchain and have the power to ban other full nodes who misbehave. Either a majority of existing full nodes must migrate to this project's version, or they must somehow be greatly outnumbered by new paid full nodes on the new version. Other powerful entities in the Bitcoin network include the exchanges and payment processors. Nearly all of these must be on board with the new version. I believe that they would be swayed primarily by popular opinion, and to a lesser extent by the possible zero-confirmation, and lower fee transactions, made possible by the single temporary mint.

I plan a friendly takeover of the blockchain in some possible future world, where I am effectively invited to do so by Bitcoin experts, media, and the public. There will be no doubt those who get spun out on the old blockchain with the old client. But I simply do not see how they could compete with this project.

I want the bitcoin experts to recognize this project as an unimplemented Bitcoin system. That requires passing a very strict test regarding the Satoshi Social Contract. A draft project whitepaper will formally specify how everything is to work. It will no doubt be revised many times, perhaps even after coding and testing reveal glaring errors on my part.