On Nov 15, 2015 5:10 AM, "Peter R via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> What rules does Bitcoin obey? 

Thanks to the worl of many people, part of the consensus rules are finally encapsulated in the libbitcoinconsensus library. I'm currently writing a document to complete the encapsulation of the specification of the consensus rules.

> I am not convinced that Bitcoin even *has* a block size limit, let alone that it can enforce one against the invisible hand of the market.

You keep insisting that some consensus rules are not consensus rules while others "are clearly a very different thing". What technical difference is there between the rule that impedes me from creating transactions bigger than X and the rules that prevent me frm creatin new coins (not as a miner, as a regular user in a transaction with more coins in the outputs than in the inputs)? What about property enforcement? If the invisible hand of the market is what decides consensus rules instead of their (still incomple) specification (aka libconsensus), then the market could decide to stop enforcing ownership.
Will you still think that Bitcoin is a useful system when/if you empirically observe the invisible hand of the market taking coins out of your pocket?

You also keep assuming that somehow it is a universal law that users must eventually converge under the most-work chain. People follow the most-work VALID chain, but if they consciously decide to implement different rules (different definitions of "valid block") then their chains can diverge, and once they do they won't converge again (unless/until one group decides to implement the rules of the other exactly again), just like when the implementation of the rules diverge in a unintentional consensus fork. But in this case they could decide to never implement the same rules.
See bip99 and specially the "schism hardforks" section for more details.

> You were the one who just brought up politics, Greg.  Not I.

Please, read the thread again. I think it is pretty clear that you did. Nothing wrong with that, just move it to the discussion ml.