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Comment by sparkie | Hacker News Reader

The point of Bitcoin is that the trust is not in specific humans or groups of humans, but in a set of humans so diverse and distributed that there is no conceivable way for a minority of them to collude to screw over the other users. Moreover, they are deterred from attempting to screw over others, because they must exhaust massive amounts of electricity to attempt to cheat them, which can't be returned whether they succeed or not.

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Unless the miners or mining groups collectively decide to fork.

I found it interesting that one of the first things that happened as bitcoin grew was the creation of mining collectives - literally the opposite of decentralization.

It's a mistake to look at pools as distinct entities in themselves or to think that their members are in cohesion to do anything other than increase their chance of monetary gain from their pool generating valid bitcoin blocks. The mining collective has no power of its own, but its power is distributed entirely among its members. A mining operator loses no autonomy by joining a pool, and can leave it just as easily as the joined. Nobody is loyal to a pool.

This is a supreme "Homo economicus" argument - there are switching costs, human factors (do I like X, do they pay on time, are they charismatic and forceful?), and dumb money problems that thwart it.

> Unless the miners or mining groups collectively decide to fork.

Miners aren't running the show by themselves. Monero will soon fork away and brick all ASICs again for example.

Forks aren't opposite of decentralization. In fact it's decentralization at work when different communities can split off and do their own thing. You're always free to use whichever fork you want, or all of them.

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