Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylersmith | Hacker News Reader

That's not true. Stakers don't make the rules any more than miners make Bitcoin rules.

The rules who to include in the block. Imagine 51% of validators exclude people who use Tornado cash (as an example of addresses that somehow relate to a smart contract)

The rest has to agree otherwise their stake is slashed.

This can't happen in bitcoin.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In scenario when 51% coalition is censoring everyone else (block producers / validators that don't belong to coalition), the way out is via UASF - user-activated soft fork. This will cause slashing of attackers via "inactivity leak mechanism".

Source: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Thanks. To me it seems this would greatly damage the value of the assets (like the blockchain wars but for ETH) but yes, it can be recovered from.

I think the problem here is centralization and this can be more easily avoided in PoW (because of energy costs rising a lot if all miners go in one place) instead of PoS (there are no physical restraints, so in theory all staking pools could be in Switzerland).

So politically it's much harder to censor a more decentralized chain.

> To me it seems this would greatly damage the value of the assets but it can be recovered from.

Why? I see this as an event that would skyrocket the price. It at the same time affirms commitment of the community to its stated values and decreases the supply greatly.

The flip side is it's virtually impossible to hide a large-scale mining operation. The meatspace footprint is just gigantic. By contrast a validator node, even one securing billions of value, can run on consumer hardware sitting behind a VPN or TOR gateway.

Miners do make Bitcoin rules though, the entire protocol is a consensus protocol driven by the miners.

Wrong; if miners deviate from the rules, then their blocks are simply ignored by everyone else.

If a group of miners with minority compute power deviate from the rules they are ignored. If a group of miners with majority of compute power deviate from the rules, they become the rules.

This process is how all changes to Bitcoin get rolled out.

The rules of the Bitcoin network are not validated by miners, they are validated by nodes. The miners have no control over nodes and unless their mining work is accepted by the consensus rules of the nodes they receive no mining reward.

> On 21 July 2017, bitcoin miners locked-in a software upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91

> By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of the bitcoin mining pools signaled support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit#Activation

That's signaling, built into the end users fully-validating nodes, to coordinate between the miners producing blocks and nodes validating them. The validating nodes are the ones that offered up and then accepted the signaling.

Signalling is not consensus I’m afraid…

Miners and nodes have to be in agreement, when they're not you're right they've essentially fork BTC but I think you're wrong about who really holds the power and which chain would end up being the authoritative one after such an event.

If a majority of miners implements new rules that the validating nodes don't support, then the blocks are just ignored. They may as well be mining Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin blocks.

The majority of miners implementing new rules only has an effect on which rules the validating nodes will start enforcing if those nodes implemented them and allowed miners to signal when to start.

Indeed, in Bitcoin it's "one CPU one vote", and by CPU it means any validating Bitcoin client.

A big miner has the same voting power as you with the client running on an RPi.

Rules of the system are implemented in the software validating the block, in so called "full nodes". It does not matter how much hashing power miner has - if they will produce invalid block, this block will get rejected by nodes. Miners have very limited powers: they decide which transactions are included (this is why we need many miners) and they decide in which order transactions are included. Users decide which token they hold (BTC or BTC Cash or Eth), which node software they run. Miners are low-margin workers.

They do not, they simply produce blocks. If they produce blocks that don't comply your nodes rules you'll ignore them and it would simply be a liveness fault and not a safety one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com