{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub1jkdfcglr59lwnhek94l393g0hhhaj0v5yzz3n5s3p0r9u0576sgs7373ck","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub1jkdfcglr59lwnhek94l393g0hhhaj0v5yzz3n5s3p0r9u0576sgs7373ck","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2014-04-26\n📝 Original message:On 26/04/14 01:28, Mike Hearn wrote:\n\u003e     When you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn\n\u003e \n\u003e     sure 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\u003e \n\u003e \n\u003e Well, I think we should avoid the term \"sacred\" - nothing is sacred\n\u003e because we're not building a religion here, we're engineering a tool.\n\nAre you sure there isn't room for just a touch of \"religion\"? :) As you\nstate below, all that protects my money from confiscation is strong\ngroup consensus that it's mine - \"a social rule, not a mathematical one.\"\n\nEverything ultimately balances on that. People being a little bit\n\"religious\" about following the protocol faithfully are the linchpin of\nBitcoin security, not PoW.\n\n\n\u003e Consider a world in which 1 satoshi is too valuable to represent some\n\u003e kinds of transactions, so those transactions stop happening even though\n\u003e we all agree they're useful. The obvious solution is to change the rules\n\u003e so there can be 210 million coins and 10x everyones UTXOs at some\n\u003e pre-agreed flag day. We probably wouldn't phrase it like that, it's\n\u003e easier for people to imagine what's happening if it's phrased as \"adding\n\u003e more places after the decimal point\" or something, but at the protocol\n\u003e level coins are represented using integers, so it'd have to be\n\u003e implemented as a multiply.\n\nAgree.\n\n\n\u003e Would this be a violation of the social contract? A violation of all\n\u003e that is sacred? I don't think so, it'd just be sensible engineering and\n\u003e there'd be strong consensus for that exactly because 21 million /is/ so\n\u003e arbitrary. If all balances and prices multiply 100-fold overnight, no\n\u003e wealth is reallocated which would be the /actual/ violation of the\n\u003e social contract: we just get more resolution for setting prices.\n\nWholeheartedly agree. \"21 million\" is just shorthand for the\npreservation of artificial scarcity. No rational person could argue that\nwhat you described violates the social contract.\n\nI do see what you're driving at - that there exists a situation where it\nwould be justified to change the interpretation of data in existing blocks.\n\nBut, please consider: if I controlled a single UTXO worth 1% of the\ntotal money supply before your change, the network would still recognise\nthat I control a single UTXO worth 1% of the total money supply after\nyour change. So you haven't really changed the interpretation of\nexisting blocks at all there. It's just semantics :)\n\nContrast this with invalidating a coinbase before maturity, which\nclearly has a very real impact. At the point the vote passes, you're ***\nsidestepping the PoW mechanism and rewriting the meaning of an existing,\nvalidated block ***.\n\n\n\u003e So. The thing that protects your money from confiscation is not proof of\n\u003e work. PoW is just a database synchronisation mechanism. The thing that\n\u003e protects your money from confiscation is a strong group consensus that\n\u003e theft is bad. But that's a social rule, not a mathematical rule.\n\nAgree. That's my whole point :)\n\nI recognise my security is in the hands of the users (the economic\nmajority.) Tomorrow they could all decide to patch their nodes to\nreallocate my UTXOs, and there's not a damn thing I could do about it,\nPoW and private keys notwithstanding. I must simply trust that they will\nnot do this.\n\nSo we can have:\n1. \"Neutral Bitcoin\", where everyone is committed to prevention of theft\nby following a simple set of mathematical rules which treat all\nvalidated blocks as equal.\nOr:\n2. \"Political Bitcoin\", where everyone is committed to prevention of\ntheft based on human judgements, and the contents of some validated\nblocks are more equal than others.\n\nI recognise that the latter allows for a lot of flexibility in combating\nfraud, but with (substantial) due respect, it isn't Bitcoin.\n\n-Gareth\n\n-------------- next part --------------\nA non-text attachment was scrubbed...\nName: signature.asc\nType: application/pgp-signature\nSize: 555 bytes\nDesc: OpenPGP digital signature\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140426/c5fcc01b/attachment.sig\u003e"}