rich1.0npub1jkdfcglr59lwnhek94l393g0hhhaj0v5yzz3n5s3p0r9u0576sgs7373ckhttps://nostr.ae/npub1jkdfcglr59lwnhek94l393g0hhhaj0v5yzz3n5s3p0r9u0576sgs7373cknjumphttps://nostr.ae📅 Original date posted:2014-04-25 📝 Original message:On 25/04/14 20:17, Mike Hearn wrote: > Proving that you can convince the economic majority that the > > interpretation of existing blocks is in any way up for grabs would set a > dangerous precedent, and shake some people's faith in Bitcoin's overall > robustness and security (well, mine anyway.) > > > Hmm, then I think your faith needs to be shaken. Bitcoin is money, and > money is a purely artificial social construct. The interpretation of > what a bitcoin means, or what a dollar means, has always been and always > will be a human decision taken in order to achieve some socially useful > goal. My argument does not concern what a bitcoin means, just what data in the blockchain means. People are free to value an individual bitcoin however they like. But it's useful if we all agree on a standard that defines who owns them - ie. the protocol as described in Satoshi's whitepaper. I recognise that your ability to provide a valid scriptSig for /any existing UTXO in the blockchain/ as proof of your ownership of the corresponding bitcoin. You want to pick and choose which UTXO (well, coinbase; same diff) you consider valid and spendable /after they've become part of the blockchain/, regardless of the fact they're buried under PoW. As an illustration, consider Counterparty - an altcoin whose TXns are embedded as unvalidated data in the bitcoin blockchain. A lot of people imagine that an XCP transaction buried under 100 blocks and a BTC transaction buried under the same 100 blocks are equally secure. You tell me: are they? It's the same PoW chain after all. Hell no they're not! The way Counterparty interprets that data in the blockchain is anything but stable or well documented. On more than one occasion they've gone "whoops, found a bug that caused some transactions to occur that we don't consider valid - we'll just fix that." A suddenly the reference client doesn't consider the XCP in your wallet valid anymore - they just magically disappear - because the parent of the TXn that paid you was actually invalid. Nobody rewrote history via PoW; they simply tweaked their interpretation of the existing history. When you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn sure that money is yours - but only because the rules for interpreting data in the blockchain are publicly documented and (hopefully) immutable. If they're mutable then the PoW alone gives me no confidence that the money is really mine, and we're left with a much less useful system. This should be more sacred than the 21m limit. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 555 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140425/e6f0b788/attachment.sig>