{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2014-04-25\n📝 Original message:\u003e\n\u003e When you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn\n\u003e\nsure that money is yours - but only because the rules for interpreting\n\u003e data in the blockchain are publicly documented and (hopefully)\n\u003e immutable. If they're mutable then the PoW alone gives me no confidence\n\u003e that the money is really mine, and we're left with a much less useful\n\u003e system. This should be more sacred than the 21m limit.\n\n\nWell, I think we should avoid the term \"sacred\" - nothing is sacred because\nwe're not building a religion here, we're engineering a tool.\n\nConsider a world in which 1 satoshi is too valuable to represent some kinds\nof transactions, so those transactions stop happening even though we all\nagree they're useful. The obvious solution is to change the rules so there\ncan be 210 million coins and 10x everyones UTXOs at some pre-agreed flag\nday. We probably wouldn't phrase it like that, it's easier for people to\nimagine what's happening if it's phrased as \"adding more places after the\ndecimal point\" or something, but at the protocol level coins are\nrepresented using integers, so it'd have to be implemented as a multiply.\n\nWould this be a violation of the social contract? A violation of all that\nis sacred? I don't think so, it'd just be sensible engineering and there'd\nbe strong consensus for that exactly because 21 million *is* so arbitrary.\nIf all balances and prices multiply 100-fold overnight, no wealth is\nreallocated which would be the *actual* violation of the social\ncontract: we just get more resolution for setting prices.\n\nSo. The thing that protects your money from confiscation is not proof of\nwork. PoW is just a database synchronisation mechanism. The thing that\nprotects your money from confiscation is a strong group consensus that\ntheft is bad. But that's a social rule, not a mathematical rule.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140425/4c07030d/attachment.html\u003e"}