Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP: Block signal enforcement via tx fees

From: Luke Dashjr <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 May 2017 05:45:24 +0000

On Saturday 13 May 2017 3:26:08 AM Eric Voskuil wrote:
> If people want to influence the decisions of miners, all they need to
> do is mine.

Most people cannot mine except at a huge expense (profit is limited to few 
people via monopoly and electric costs). But more importantly, the profits 
from every miner you buy will go to pay for Bitmain growing their arsenal more 
than enough to offset your influence.

Mining is simply broken at this point.

> There is nothing inherently wrong with paying people to run nodes or
> signal "readiness", but there is no reason whatsoever to consider
> these ideas beneficial from a personal/economic or
> security/decentralization standpoint.

Running a node and mining are two very different things.

> The argument fails to recognize that mining for one's self may (or may
> not) result in a net loss, but donating to a miner in the hope of some
> action is comparatively a total loss. One is an expense in exchange
> for the intended social outcome, and the other is payment for
> representative government.
> 
> And in this form of representative government that you propose, if we
> assume that miners are somehow bound to honor the payments (votes), ...

First of all, this isn't donating to miners, but forbidding them from mining 
your transaction (and thereby collecting your transaction fee) unless they 
signal for the softfork.

Secondly, your argument here assumes miners are a government or control 
Bitcoin in some way. This is not correct. Miners are entrusted with 
enforcement of softforks *for old nodes only*, and therefore given the ability 
to trigger activation of the new rules via signalling. But entrusting them 
with this is NOT done by the system itself, but by the users, whose updated 
nodes are the primary mechanism for enforcing softforks. So miners are in fact 
already bound to honour the wishes of the greater economy, and their refusal 
to do so is an attack on the network.

Luke