Author: Alex Morcos 2015-08-04 14:45:38
Published on: 2015-08-04T14:45:38+00:00
In an email chain between Gavin Andresen and Pieter Wuille, the issue of centralized mining in the Bitcoin network was brought up. Wuille argued that the mining landscape is too centralized, with a majority of miners relying on agreements to trust each other's announced blocks without validation. Andresen questioned why this is a problem, noting that nobody besides miners running old or buggy software lost money due to outsourced mining validation. He also criticized the operators of bitcoin.org for freaking out and pushing the panic button regarding the situation. Andresen went on to express concern over the BIP66 mini-forks and the need for core developers to manually monitor and intervene to prevent significant damage to the network. He argued that the Bitcoin system needs to be made fundamentally more secure if it is going to succeed and not depend on the good will of any particular parties. He also stated that while urgent forks like the BIP66 fork were necessary to fix undisclosed consensus bugs, changes to consensus limits that a significant proportion of the community disagrees with should raise red flags.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T04:35:36.772591+00:00