20 sats \ 1 reply \ @Cornholio OP 24 Jun 2022 freebie \ parent \ on: What happens if an entity operates a majority of Bitcoin nodes? bitcoin
Yeah that is kind of what I was thinking but I think so far the answers are actually much simpler than what is being presented. So if I had to summarize what I have learned so far it would be something like:
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It is not enough for someone to control a majority of nodes. Entities from the old network would have to migrate since it is a hard fork onto a new network. This could only happen if the bad actor can market a reason for enough entities to exit.
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It is not enough for this to bootstrap the network, because some portion of miners would also have to begin mining on the new network. Same as before, the bad actor would have to market a reason for enough miners to switch and come online.
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None of the above conditions are viable to weaken the old network to the point of significant destabilization where the new network overtakes as the leading network, because you would have to see a mass exit from both entities running nodes and miners onto the new network where the threshold of adoption and hash rate is higher than the old network.
Would that be accurate?
Think of it this way. There is no "official" bitcoin anything. If 80% of the hashrate adopts a fork and 20% of the hashrate sticks with the old protocol, does the side with the 80% become the "official" bitcoin? I don't know. If I haven't "upgraded" and blocks are still being mined, ... then as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on the same bitcoin that I've always been on. It's possible the miners who were on the side with 80% of the hashrate will eventually abandon that side and return to the original protocol.
That's why "crypto-economics" is not just hashrate, and not just a protocol, but something more complicated. It involves game theory, economics, and cryptography.
There has even been an unintentional hard fork:
Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked?
https://blog.lopp.net/has-bitcoin-ever-hard-forked/
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