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dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

He stated PoW was _essentially_ one-CPU-one-vote. It's clear that the intent is to mean hashrate, or CPU power as he phrases it multiple times in the same paper.

> it's not an election, it's more like a random lottery or something.

A random lottery where your odds of winning directly correlate with your CPU power / hashrate. The more you win the more influence you have over the state of the network. Comparing it to a vote is a reasonable analogy.

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

> it's obvious that Proof-of-Work has not been used to decide consensus protocol parameters

Every "soft-fork" to date has used PoW to activate new consensus rules by requiring block version super-majority.

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

You made the claim that under "Nakamoto consensus" the consensus parameters are not up for a vote. A correction seemed warranted.

> Block size is not a parameter you can force on upgraded nodes by soft-fork.

Isn't this what the Segregated Witness proposal[1] effectively does? The new limit proposed would be 4MB with an expected confirmed transaction throughput increase on the order of 2x.

To quote Pieter:

"Another way of looking at it, is that we raise the block size to 4 MB for the witness part, but the non-witness has same size."

[1] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/s...

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

The upgrades are triggered by a super-majority of blocks of a certain version. This version maps to a possible new consensus rule. Block creation is a product of computational work. Therefore there is a precedent for CPUs/ASICs voting on the consensus rules of the system.

> ISM is used for soft-fork upgrades, which do not change existing consensus rules.

"Soft-forks" do change existing consensus rules. Will a miner's v1 blocks be accepted by the majority of the network today?

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/be9a9a3d2253ceccf123...

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

> The nature of Nakamoto consensus is such that consensus parameters are not up to vote

"The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote." - Nakamoto

dontbelieveyouon Lightning Network Skepticism

Response: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16...