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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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