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Comment by creeble | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is precisely that it is (maybe) a democracy -- and that's not what people expected. They expected a distributed, "trust free" network for clearing transactions.

And no such thing exists, as it turns out. How can this not be bitcoin's practical death?

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Well, so far none of the chain forks have been accepted by the network, so I wouldn't call it dead yet.

It really isn't a democracy - there is no method to force the minority into the majority's will. If a controversial chain fork happens, there will now be two Bitcoin currencies. Those on the original chain won't be forced to switch.

They won't be forced to switch but they will be highly incentivized to do so, as people in the minority coin sell them out to buy the majority coin.

Will be really interesting if any exchanges support this concept of two bitcoin chains coexisting. I bet they don't.

Right, but it's also hard to define the "majority" and "minority" coin here. You could define "majority" based on "most hashpower", but say that chain is being mined exclusively by the 3 largest China-based miners, would it still be considered the most valuable? Or maybe only by one miner, like when ghash.io was over 50%?

If the exchanges don't support the concept, it'll still at least be up to the user to figure out which chain the exchange is on.

A functional democracy could be as effective as a "trust free" basis for choices of operational consequence on the network. In a sense, that's what a democracy is, anyway. One only needs to observe the schism between the left and the right in pretty much any democracy.

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