88 karma · joined December 26, 2015
Mining only costs a lot because coin value is high and the block reward is high. This means miners are willing to spend more to win the reward.
As the block reward lowers then mining becomes funded entirely by equilibrium-priced fees.
Or natural scarcity, which already exists.
One of two things must therefore be true:
1. If consensus parameters cannot be voted on then Bitcoin is a failure, and Core's huge war against upstarts like XT and BU are totally misplaced (since as you say they cannot be changed by vote) or
2. You're dead wrong
If consensus parameters are not up to vote then obviously XT simply cannot be "voted in", so why fight it?
If consensus parameters are not up for a vote then Bitcoin loses permissionlessness and censorship resistance: a hostile actor merely needs to infiltrate the governance structure of one ragtag dev team and he can block certain transactions or indeed greatly harm the network by inserting consensus code to keep undesirable txns out or by making the rules unworkable. Since nobody can vote the bad rules out, the network just has to accept the bad rules and implode.
If consensus rules cannot be voted on then permissionless innovation of the system is thwarted or impossible. If I have a great idea for a consensus rule innovation, I have to get permission from the keepers of the consensus rules to add my rule change.
If consensus rules are not up for vote then if a supermajority of users including miners attempt to change the rules by running different rules, nothing will happen, because the rules "weren't up to vote." But it is objectively the case that if this were to happen, then the rules would be changed because a majority of voters agreed with the change. This is the defacto behavior of Bitcoin.
Methinks that #2 is the case. Consensus rules, as a simple matter of fact, are amenable to change by a simple supermajority of CPU votes from a majority of miners and nodes.