Author: Gareth Williams 2014-04-30 13:00:06
Published on: 2014-04-30T13:00:06+00:00
In an email thread from 2014, Mike Hearn expressed the opinion that Bitcoin should move beyond being seen as an embodiment of natural mathematical law. However, others in the conversation argued that Bitcoin is an elegant embodiment of artificially contrived mathematical rules that happen to be useful. They maintained that these rules are not immutable, but that it would be unwise to introduce unpredictable elements like human politics into the system. One participant in the conversation also clarified that miners and nodes ignoring a block that creates formula coins is not a majority vote on a controversial political matter, but rather the node enforcing the protocol. The protocol is clearly defined, and one either follows it or is not running a Bitcoin node. In contrast, a mechanism for voting to reinterpret the meaning of arbitrary blocks does not currently exist.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:52:07.183111+00:00