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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Nodes can mine, but they don't have to. They participate in validation, which is distinct from mining.

That seems inconsistent with the paper. For example, from the conclusion:

  [Nodes] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
  valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
  them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

I do see the separate section on "Simplified Payment Verification", which does seem distinct from mining. Is that what you are referring to?

I'm referring to how the network is actually implemented. The paper is simply vague on the point.

It's very possible he never imagined* a non-mining full-node(as opposed to an spv node). Regardless full-nodes do enforce the consensus rules and reject invalid blocks.

* Another phenomenon he didn't imagine was mining pools, which drastically changed the dynamics of mining.

*Or she.

But that's an interesting point re mining pools. Do you have any links to more information about how they drastically changed dynamics?

*Or they.

mining pools only group hashpower for the purpose of reducing variance and distributing payment. The mining pool does not dictate what the individual miners in the pool can and cannot do. Individual miners can enter and leave mining pools at will. Mining pools change nothing. Non-mining nodes enforce nothing without proof-of-work.

And yet here we are seeing off four hostile fork attempts in a couple of years (xt/classic/bu/2x). You'd think after four failures in a row, all failing for exactly the same reason, that the people supporting the failures might learn why they fail. But here we are. Explaining why they fail, after they fail, and yet the supporters of the failures are trying to assert that even though they fail, they understand the system. Without even acknowledging that they have failed, let alone why.

non-mining nodes attributed nothing to the failure of those forks. Look, you can stay stupid forever, it's ok, stupid people can still run nodes and use bitcoins.

but but but I thought you said nodes didn't matter? I thought you said miners make all of the decisions, which 97% were signalling 2x at one point, so couldn't they just adopt whatever consensus rules they want?

Or, perhaps, you don't actually know how bitcoin works, and therefore you can't explain how miner 'support' disappeared, as soon as it came time to decide whether they wanted to be bitcoin miners, or become alt-coin miners? You know, given that the nodes police and enforce consensus in bitcoin 'n all. Miners had a choice. Do what you're told, and mine according to node consensus rules, or don't get paid in bitcoin. So they did what they were told.

And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.

I suppose your full node client software must have pop-up windows when forks happen and you are prompted to click "accept" or "reject"; and when invalid blocks are detected, it prompts you if you would like to "accept", "re-try", or "delete".

That makes no sense at all.

You're right, a non-mining node still enforces the consensus rules. A non-mining node will reject any invalid blocks. Even if I controlled 100% of the mining hashrate I could not create a block that did something to violate the consensus rules. For example I couldn't mine a block that resulted in >21MM bitcoins.

You can definitely 'mine' such a block. The problem is getting the rest of the network to accept it. In fact, with Bitcoin Cash you can basically see what happens if blocks are created according to different rules.

However I image if suddenl 100% of the miners decided 42MM bitcoins is better (because 42), something a lot of users would be opposed to (printing money), things would become 'interesting'.

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