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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 23 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: "If all the people around tells you that you’re drunk - maybe you're just drunk" bitcoin
Your concerns are legit, so I don't know how to put your mind at ease. But one thing you haven't mentioned is that if miners start fucking with previous blocks as a general strategy, the value of btc in general is likely to go into the toilet, which means they'll be killing their golden goose. That's another element to consider, and why this is so hard to reason about with anything like confidence.
What I think you can reason about is that everything we currently know suggests that paying for reasonable levels of security is likely to be a problem, and something will have to be done eventually. Throwing a wide net around what that 'something' is would be a very good thing to start to do in earnest.
Yes, I agree on both points, but I also think your point about decreasing value of BTC would be a second-order consequence and the naughty miners would already have their profits in the bag. In today's advanced marketplace, these "miners" may not even need to own ASICs, since they can purchase hashrate to scalp large fees - without a subsidy, hashrate becomes more malleable to the highest bidder. Likewise, a decreasing BTC value could result in fewer miners, which lowers the difficulty for reorg shenanigans to be successful. So I actually think the worse BTC performs, the easier it becomes for nonsense to carry on.
I think your second point is really important, and I'm glad this thread has been quite civil because I know it can be a sensitive topic. I would really like to see discussions about contingency plans because I think these issues can be very "gradually and then suddenly" in how they manifest. Having a community consensus around possible ways to handle it and maybe some math/models and/or code skeletons to test/simulate would be really beneficial.
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The ecosystem is so complex now that playing out the game theory is beyond my ability. You could be right wrt miners and their purchased hashrate. I don't have a good feel for it.
I'm glad this thread has been quite civil because I know it can be a sensitive topic.
That's the beautiful thing about SN, you can find this kind of discussion. You have to look and curate it somehow, but at least it's there!
Having a community consensus around possible ways to handle it and maybe some math/models and/or code skeletons to test/simulate would be really beneficial.
Consensus is almost certainly too much to ask for, but how amazing would it be to have a bunch of detailed writeups, w/ code, simulation results, etc? From what I believe about human nature, these wouldn't persuade anybody, or reduce the idiocy, but once the shit hit the fat, having these well-fleshed-out ideas, complete with code and some data and concrete artifacts, would be a huge boon.
I think future bitcoin development, esp when its under duress, is likely to be a complete garbage-can model, and knowing that should allow us to prepare (and, eventually, react) sensibly.
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That's the most simple way to handle it:
If we would have four years long network difficulty regression - then it's emergency, and new code handling such danger - should delay halving to the next halving, until difficulty will recover
if there is no such emergency situation - there is no trigger, and old and new code would work together like a charm = so there is no hard fork at all
simple, conservative (and beautiful) solution in my opinion, so it fits to Bitcoin very well
such solution above is fueled 100% by free market only
and the natural inflation level is set by Bitcoin itself, on some certain, completely unpredictable level
(and that's why I'm not sure we would be able to apply any math/model here)
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