Hacker News Reader

This is just plain incorrect. Every cryptocurrency's rules can be changed via hard fork. Bitcoin doesn't have any magic property that guarantees there won't be a hard fork affecting the emission schedule.

View on HN

Bitcoin actually has this "magic" property of being very, very hard to change. It is derived from community extremism against changes and from the huge number of players who would need to agree and then huge number of existing deployments that are very slow to upgrade.

Bitcoin is hard to change the similar way TCP/IP protocol stack is hard to change.

It's easier than you think. Just five organizations command >50% of hashpower[0]. I don't think it's likely to change soon but it's not out of the realm of possibility, and it's not even the most decentralized cryptocurrency in terms of difficulty to enforce new network rules.

[0] https://news.bitcoin.com/5-mining-50-btc-hashrate/ (I fully understand this is a pro-BCH site but their sources are accurate)

Bitcoin's "magic property" is the faith that the miners have. It has been hardforked, but the majority of computing power has chosen to stay on Bitcoin.

I fully understand that, but sentiment can change. It's disingenuous to say it won't change in the future because it hasn't yet changed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com