Author: Mike Hearn 2014-04-29 14:13:28
Published on: 2014-04-29T14:13:28+00:00
The idea of Bitcoin being a natural mathematical law is not true and it should be accepted that Bitcoin is just a piece of software that encodes rules to run a community in specific ways. The creation of >formula() coins by miners and nodes who ignore a block is a majority vote on a controversial political matter, as evidenced by the disagreement with mainstream economics and it is one of the most common things for altcoins to change. Satoshi's chosen inflation formula is a highly political statement on the value of inflation. Bitcoin could have been programmed to inflate forever and avoided politics but it chose not to. Adam Back thinks that if Bitcoin is not provable, then no consensus rule can be constructed requiring proof and so it risks devolving to a political decision. However, it is the other way around. If miners decide to fork the chain then that leaves no proof beyond the old blocks. If they explicitly vote to get the same effect but without actually forking, it leaves a proof in the form of the votes in the coinbase that can be seen afterward. Finney attackers voting down other pools to make a point only works if the majority of hashpower is controlled by attackers; otherwise, Bitcoin is already doomed.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:51:46.945464+00:00