{"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:2014-04-25\n📝 Original message:On 25/04/14 20:17, Mike Hearn wrote:\n\u003e     Proving that you can convince the economic majority that the\n\u003e \n\u003e     interpretation of existing blocks is in any way up for grabs would set a\n\u003e     dangerous precedent, and shake some people's faith in Bitcoin's overall\n\u003e     robustness and security (well, mine anyway.)\n\u003e \n\u003e \n\u003e Hmm, then I think your faith needs to be shaken. Bitcoin  is money, and\n\u003e money is a purely artificial social construct. The interpretation of\n\u003e what a bitcoin means, or what a dollar means, has always been and always\n\u003e will be a human decision taken in order to achieve some socially useful\n\u003e goal. \n\nMy argument does not concern what a bitcoin means, just what data in the\nblockchain means. People are free to value an individual bitcoin however\nthey like. But it's useful if we all agree on a standard that defines\nwho owns them - ie. the protocol as described in Satoshi's whitepaper. I\nrecognise that your ability to provide a valid scriptSig for /any\nexisting UTXO in the blockchain/ as proof of your ownership of the\ncorresponding bitcoin. You want to pick and choose which UTXO (well,\ncoinbase; same diff) you consider valid and spendable /after they've\nbecome part of the blockchain/, regardless of the fact they're buried\nunder PoW.\n\nAs an illustration, consider Counterparty - an altcoin whose TXns are\nembedded as unvalidated data in the bitcoin blockchain. A lot of people\nimagine that an XCP transaction buried under 100 blocks and a BTC\ntransaction buried under the same 100 blocks are equally secure. You\ntell me: are they? It's the same PoW chain after all.\n\nHell no they're not! The way Counterparty interprets that data in the\nblockchain is anything but stable or well documented. On more than one\noccasion they've gone \"whoops, found a bug that caused some transactions\nto occur that we don't consider valid - we'll just fix that.\" A suddenly\nthe reference client doesn't consider the XCP in your wallet valid\nanymore - they just magically disappear - because the parent of the TXn\nthat paid you was actually invalid. Nobody rewrote history via PoW; they\nsimply tweaked their interpretation of the existing history.\n\nWhen you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn\nsure that money is yours - but only because the rules for interpreting\ndata in the blockchain are publicly documented and (hopefully)\nimmutable. If they're mutable then the PoW alone gives me no confidence\nthat the money is really mine, and we're left with a much less useful\nsystem. This should be more sacred than the 21m limit.\n\n\n\n\n\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/20140425/e6f0b788/attachment.sig\u003e"}