Author: Roy Badami 2015-05-07 22:08:48
Published on: 2015-05-07T22:08:48+00:00
In a thread on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Pieter Wuille said that he would not modify his node if the change introduced a perpetual 100 BTC subsidy per block, even if 99% of miners went along with it. In response, someone stated that surely if this happened, Bitcoin would be dead. If the fork you prefer has only 1% of the hash power it is trivially vulnerable not just to a 51% attack but to a 501% attack, not to mention the fact that you'd only be getting one block every 16 hours. Pieter Wuille believes a hardfork is safe when 100% of (economically relevant) users upgrade. If miners don't upgrade at that point, they just lose money. However, requiring a supermajority of miners is surely a wise precaution. A realistic scenario where 99% of miners vote for the hard fork to go ahead, and the economic majority votes to stay on the blockchain whose hashrate has just dropped two orders of magnitude, so low that the mean time between blocks is now over 16 hours seems unlikely. The March 2013 fork showed that miners upgrade at a different schedule than the rest of the network.Roy Badami asked whether it's plausible that 99.99% of the miners updated and only 75% of merchants and 75% of users updated? Certainly *if* the consensus rules required a 99% supermajority of miners for the hard fork to go ahead, then there would be absolutely no rational reason for merchants and users to refuse to upgrade, even if they don't support the changes introduces by the hard fork.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:52:33.289994+00:00