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Wrong. NODEs (individual network participants) enforce the rules, not miners.


Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.


Its the other way round -- nothing forces nodes to accept bad blocks from miners. An honest node would simply ignore the bad data. The exchanges run nodes, so I would rather be generating or receiving transactions on a chain (or fork) that its users are engaging with. Nodes accept blocks from miners, miners don't accept blocks from nodes.


Aren’t both things true? Miners can’t force nodes to accept blocks as being valid, nodes can’t force miners to include transactions in their blocks.

These statements are not in conflict.


The difference being that anyone can mine, so even if 99% of miners are censoring a transaction, it will still likely be confirmed in a block.


Isn’t there an incentive to run a node for privacy? With your own node you are not leaking your xpub and you don’t leak your transactions by staring at them on a block explorer


Wouldn't your own node unless properly hidden be higher chance of leaking your transactions? As I would expect them to come from your own node... Ofc, tracking the ones made from other services sure it is safer.


Where do those honest blocks come from, if not from honest miners? Where do honest miners come from?


Nodes still work on consensus, and given that they have no incentivization to exist, they have been dropping in number over years.


>Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.

I deleted a previous reply to you because I think I may have misunderstood what you wrote. In any case, are you saying the majority of miners have the ultimate control of the protocol rules of the cryptocurrency?


Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder) majority is an extremely important part of it.


>Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder) majority is an extremely important part of it.

In 2017, the majority of miner hashpower wanted to change the Bitcoin protocol to increase 1MB blocksize to 2MB but the SegWit2x failed to be adopted. What's your interpretation of that event?


They signaled support for it, but when push came to shove, they bailed.

I'm not saying 51% of miners decide what the rules are. Suppose you had a Bitcoin fork that had 80% of the hashrate. How long would that situation need to persist until the major network participants decide to call that fork "Bitcoin"?


All In: "Haha OS-driven regex engine go brrrrr"



If this was made as a joke (yes?), that's a pretty good punchline.


By the time it's severe, it's often too late: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1244717172871409666?s=20


Relevant: WTFHappenedIn1971.com


Answer: Our governments printed a shit-ton of money.


then we should expect similar inflation for prices of all types of things, but that's not what we're seeing.


Stocks, startup valuations, and crypto coins all fit the same trend as housing prices. Which investment vehicles in the US haven't skyrocketed in value the past 10 years?


goods inflation hasn't happened because these printed monies are not given to the average (or poor) person, but to financial institutions and large investment banks (in the form of low rates). The inflation of asset prices has indeed increased - and if the Feds continue down this course, the high prices for all assets will be the new norm.


Or very low interest rates?


Same thing, no?


Also, debt.



No. There is no way for Bitcoin mining to "break SHA-256 and render it insecure". There isn't enough energy in the whole SUN to do that.


Well Bitcoin mining could "break SHA-256 and render it insecure" by:

1. exploiting cryptanalytic weaknesses in SHA-256,

2. successes in new computing paradigms such as a large scale quantum computer using Grover's algorithm.

3. or turning the local galactic cluster into computronium for SHA-256 miners. Although at that point we have bigger problems. =)

If you think SHA-256 will not be broken anytime soon then that suggests that you believe that mining difficulty increases will slow down.


"Slow Database"-Flavored WASI

Any time you see the word "blockchain" replace it with "Slow Database" in your head and see if it still makes sense.


I checked the shipping status of an Alibaba purchase today after I received the Fedex notification yesterday.

The message on the Alibaba site said:

"Attention: Tracking information is supported by the Alibaba Global Trade Blockchain. It may be delayed for 1-2 days."


My brain was making combinations like Slow braised Wasabi flavored etc.


Indeed, I felt like I was reading an article about how to abuse stored procedures in order to push all of the computation to the database, even the inefficient parts. [0]

[0] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Stored__0x26__0x23_220_...


Any time you do a generalization, you are wrong.


Infinite recursion.


The Blockchain is the slowest and at the same time most energy hungry Datastore mankind has ever build. And in the case of bitcoin it's not fit for the job it was developed for.


It was designed to help create a timestamp for blocks of transactions. It's doing that just fine for Bitcoin.


There's no way for the blockchain to validate time stamping due to fluctuation in hash power and the nature of an adversarial network with untrusted data.

What's been happening is blocktimes wildly fluctuate, anywhere from 20 seconds - 90 minutes + even though the software attempts to calibrate for 10 minutes.


He just means things are unequivoqually ordered in time, so each block is a time stamp. Not necessarily running at constant frequency as our other time keeping tools.


This is a cheap throwaway joke that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the article. It would have been possible to make this joke by only reading the title.


Incerto series by Taleb


Asset inflation.


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