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Comment by fra | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, NNT gets a key detail wrong: Bitcoin isn't controlled by its users, it's controlled by the miners.

That’s a gross oversimplification. There are thousands of Bitcoin nodes running right now who verify that the miners are honest. Miners could refuse to include any transactions at all, but that would amount to a sort of constant denial-of-service attack, and could be resolved by moving to a new proof-of-work function (thus rendering all current Bitcoin mining hardware worthless).

Non-mining nodes still enforce the consensus rules. Miners can't just decide to increase the block size or change the total # of bitcoin to 42 million.

Non-mining nodes do not have the ability to change the block chain and therefore they do not affect the rest of the network.

Read up on UASF http://www.uasf.co/

Read up on the Bitcoin whitepaper

And yet ultimately the users can move to a fork if they are unhappy. To wit: Bitcoin Cash, which is the true bitcoin. (With Bitcoin Cash, Nassim's coffeeshop transaction would indeed be possible, and without needing to wait for 10+ minutes, contrary to popular belief.)

No the miners are the ones that can fork if they are unhappy. Users are held hostage by the miners for any PoW cryptocurrency. If they want their holdings to be worth anything, they have to endlessly shill for their currency or else they'll go broke.

Read this as a comment from a cryptocurrency lurker.

> Bitcoin Cash, which is the true bitcoin.

I see this statement repeated often, to the point of sounding like a strategy of "if you repeat a lie enough, people will believe it". Isn't Bitcoin Cash the minority result of a Bitcoin fork? Isn't the majority result by definition the true Bitcoin?

Bitcoin cash is much closer to the original implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto. It's simply a much smaller, and IMO, cleaner codebase that just increased one parameter to achieve scaling.

Bitcoin core (what we call BTC) has many more lines of non-Satoshi code that was added to facilitate off-chain scaling.

The thing is that Satoshi never left a roadmap, and indefinitely increasing the block size to meet demand isn't plausible. So even if bcash were to become the "real bitcoin" it would have to come up with an off-chain solution.

SegWit and Lightning are such elegant solutions that I can't really see a person as brilliant as Satoshi rejecting it.

Bitcoin Cash is a non-evolving non-innovating whitepaper cult claiming to be btc because they believe btc should be exactly what was defined on a piece of paper 9 years ago, totally disregarding new/improved tech.

Not true. Bitcoin Cash supporters (including myself) just want on-chain scaling pursued. There's a lot you can do there (graphene, pruning, sharding) before resorting to off-chain scaling.

Users don't move to a fork, the supporting institutions do (miners, exchanges, wallet developers). In essence we're back to square one. Our future is being decided by a few, centralized entities with majority control over the system.

Your comment is bad, but since you brought it up, you can buy coffee with bitcoin: https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736

The lightning network is still in beta, but it's certainly a much more scalable solution than bcash or any other fork.

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