Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't understand why crypto, and especially PoW, is so special. My understanding is that crypto is good because 1) you can't "forge" crypto (mining is different since it takes resources), and 2) you can make transactions that are harder to track. Particularly because governments "forge" (print) money all the time, and heavily track how we spend.

Ultimately, currency only has meaning because we assign value to it. The only intrinsic currencies are food, shelter, luxuries, etc. If people stop accepting Bitcoin, "I can prove that I have X bitcoin" no longer means anything. If government outlaws bitcoin and forces you to use USD, it doesn't matter that they can't forge or track bitcoin, because you have to use USD.

A lot of people argue that PoS is bad because roughly "the people who control the most etherium can dictate the rules", but the people who control the resources we need will always dictate the rules.

> Forking a proof-of-stake chain can create two chains, each of which is endorsed by a majority of stakers in that chain. This split can repeat ad infinitum. Which will be the “real” one?

Isn't this the same as Bitcoin vs. Dogecoin vs. etcCoin?

The author is poorly informed. Splits have happened and do happen, there's about 3 or 4 direct Bitcoin forks but they have little use. Social consensus is what ultimately controls which blockchain is viewed as the legitimate one. So if some plurality of rich stakers wanted to do a hostile takeover of a network, the community could create a fork where the oligarch coins are frozen and continue from there.

> So if some plurality of rich stakers wanted to do a hostile takeover of a network, the community could create a fork where the oligarch coins are frozen and continue from there.

What's the "community" here? What would incentivise users to consider the new fork to be the legitimate one? If rich oligarchs control the first one - how do you build trust in the new one as opposed the current one? As a fiat currency - I would assume the rich oligarchs would have a great chance of leveraging wealth into ensuring that the current coin gets marketed and hence holds trust? The USD holds its current position because the US Gov stands behind it - what would keep the oligarchs propping the current coin up as opposed to the forked coin?

I'm sorry if this sounds silly - as I'm not very into crypto.

This has already happened: https://cryptoslate.com/steem-community-fights-justin-sun-wi...

Justin Sun tried to take over the Steem network and the community simply forked it. The network that has the most legitimacy is a matter of social consensus, always. That's true of all currency, by the way. If the world starts to reject a currency, that currency can undergo tremendous inflation in a rapid amount of time. This same fate that has happened to other currencies could happen to the USD. The German Mark lost its value in the 1920s. The Argentine peso is currently undergoing the same effect: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-cpi

Supply and demand are laws of economics. Can't be avoided. Currency issuers can control supply but they can't necessarily control demand. They can try to influence demand, but ultimately it rests on a community or a marketplace to decide that. Doesn't matter how absolute your power is, you can't beat economics in the long run. Read a history book about all the failed empires of history. It's almost always a monetary phenomenon that does them in.

> Splits have happened and do happen, there's about 3 or 4 direct Bitcoin forks but they have little use. Social consensus is what ultimately controls which blockchain is viewed as the legitimate one.

If you had a node running since 2016 and didn't touch it at all, right not it would still be following the Bitcoin blockchain and not any of the splits that were created since via hard-forks.

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