What do miners control vs plebs?
267 sats \ 14 comments \ @phaedrus 4 Sep 2022 bitcoin
Reading interview with Vitalik he says that miners don't control the protocol (and that we learned in block size wars), ie they don't choose the rules, just enforce them, and order the transactions.
I would love to understand this more:
  • what is controlled by the miners?
  • what is controlled by the plebs running full nodes?
  • what is controlled by people using custodial wallets?
I'm interested in both theoretical answers and especially empirical examples (from the Bitcoin history).
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121 sats \ 0 replies \ @takaponka 5 Sep 2022
Miners are node slaves. They work for them because it's profitable. Nodes validate, miners do NOT
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125 sats \ 3 replies \ @moneroshill 5 Sep 2022
he says that miners don't control the protocol (and that we learned in block size wars)
It is blatantly obvious that the miners do not control the protocol. We did not learn that during the block size wars, it was obvious since the beginning that changes like increasing the block size will result in a "hard fork". See these quotes from satoshi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg15139
what is controlled by the miners?
What transactions get in a block, and to some extent, the order of those blocks.
what is controlled by the plebs running full nodes?
Fuck all.
what is controlled by people using custodial wallets?
They have a digital "IOU" in the database (table) of someone who actually owns bitcoin (such as a bank, exchange or other custodian).
I'm interested in both theoretical answers and especially empirical examples (from the Bitcoin history).
Theoretical answers? This is not some sort of wishy-washy historical debate. These are simply hard facts about the network that are intrinsic to its design.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @pillar 5 Sep 2022
They have a digital "IOU" in the database (table) of someone who actually owns bitcoin [...]
Just wanted to add that the last part of this sentence does not need to be true. I would keep it at "They have a digital "IOU". The rest, under no proof-of-reserves, is theoretical and trust based.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @phaedrus OP 5 Sep 2022
How Bitcoin works is not wishy-washy, but that's not what I meant by this question. I'm curious about the implications, ie miners can't change the protocol rules (hard fork) even if they have 100% hash power, but they can censor transactions. Is that an absolute statement? I'm not sure.
If 2017 taught me anything, that its really hard to predict what's gonna happen. Back then I thought the hard fork was inevitable since so many miners were behind it. It's easy to say it was obvious, but it wasn't to me at that time, so I'm curious to learn what else am I missing.
How about KYC? Who can enforce that?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 6 Sep 2022
Just like with drug laws. They can make weed illegal to use. But that doesn't mean there will be compliance with the law. With mass non-compliance, those laws either get repealed, or they stop being enforced, or if still enforced, enforcement simply occurs for the most egregious examples, or sporadically and publicized to make an example out of the unlucky target.
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700 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryptocoin 6 Sep 2022
I'm interested in both theoretical answers and especially empirical examples (from the Bitcoin history).
It could be that you want ask the question "what are economic nodes, and why do they alone hold the power to change the protocol?".
I only did a rudimentary search and the only thing I found was:
What is meant by the term 'economic node'? https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n5ku1r [Teddit]
Which links to:
We need Bitcoin full nodes. Economic ones https://shiftcrypto.ch/blog/we-need-bitcoin-full-nodes-economic-ones
Prior to the concept of "economic nodes" was Economic Majority, This wiki article has some good info on that:
Economic majority https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority
which has a link to:
Bitcoin is not ruled by miners https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 6 Sep 2022
And the empirical examples:
Re; the "Blockchain wars" that resulted in the BCash fork in 2017. The majority of the hashrate had signaled support for Segwit2X. Economic nodes prepared a UASF (i.e., said "no fucking way") which resulting in most of those miners realizing that the economic nodes wouldn't recognize (i.e., "buy") their BTC that they mined in SegWit2X blocks so they tucked their tails and went along with with the Segwit soft fork instead.
Prior to that, March 2013 ... the netsplit that occurred as a result of a new release that unintentionally had a change to the protocol. Some miners had not been running the new v0.8 client, and majority of the hashrate was running v0.8. A netsplit happened as a result of that unintentional change, and the side with the miners running v0.8 had been solving blocks faster, and were six blocks (coincidentally) ahead. What to do? Well, that was decided after one question was answered: "What side is Mt. Gox on?" Mt. Gox was like 80% of the exchange market at the time. Mt. Gox essentially had the majority of the economic nodes (by quantity of bitcoin buy/sell activity), and after learning that Mt. Gox had not been using v0.8, the leading pool miner voluntarily abandoned the v0.8 side (including multiple blocks that they had mined), and redirected their hashrate to the same side of the net split that Mt. Gox was on (i.e., the pre-v0.8 side). Thus the miners did a "friendly" 51% attack to comply with what the economic nodes demanded.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin 6 Sep 2022
Miners have one job.
all miners do is cement an ordering of transactions.
what is controlled by the plebs running full nodes?
Your full node protects you. It does not protect the network.
what is controlled by people using custodial wallets?
  • They have the control to Tweet about how screwed they are that they do not have access to their funds (for the latest example, ... see Poolin miners, where poolin was the custodian for their mined earnings that they had not yet withdrawn).
  • These custodial wallet users may (or may not, depending on the jurisdiction) have the ability to petition the courts for relief if the custodian does not provide access to the funds, or if things are worse, these custodial wallet users may be able to submit a claim to the trustee for the custodian's bankruptcy case.
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51 sats \ 2 replies \ @premitive1 4 Sep 2022
miners find proof-of-work which generates blocks. While hashing for proof of work, they add transactions from the mempool into the block they attempt to generate.
nodes listen for new blocks, and when they get them, they check the validity of those blocks, and if so found, they add that block to their chain and propagate that new block to the rest of their network.
Nothing else matters, so I won't address your third question.
I'm sure other people can chime in with more detail, but I base my answer on dozens of discussions on this very topic with various people from different backgrounds.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @phaedrus OP 5 Sep 2022
This describes how Bitcoin works.
What are the implications of that, from the perspective of controlling/changing things, enforcing KYC, etc?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @premitive1 5 Sep 2022
The vagueness of your sought-after conclusionons make it hard to reasonably address the question.
We can draw a bunch of implications. For instance, the only method for validating tranactions in Bitcoin requires miners to include transactions in blocks. People wanting to do bitcoin layer one transactions must submit a transaction to the mempool or to a miner for inclusion in a block.
Unrelated to the scope of what I wrote so far in this thread, private keys control/change UTXOs, through the mechanism explained above.
Therefore, one can imagine that if the person with private keys refused to, or it the miners refused to, cooperate to validate a transaction, it will never make it to the block chain.
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500 sats \ 0 replies \ @02174b3c39_lntxbot 28 Sep 2022
Miners serve a zero demand response monopsony, the bitcoin blockchain.
They can hash more, they can hash less, and the only thing that changes is their share of the blocks & rewards.
They control themselves, including how many bitcoin they buy and sell.
Plebs running nodes are self-sovereign and that's it.
People using custodial wallets control nothing.
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400 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 5 Sep 2022
Nodes/plebs run the ruleset that enforces how transactions can be broadcast and added to the chain, anything that deviates from that would be rejected, as a miner, you don't want to risk that and waste energy resources, it's far better to play by the rules
miners are also running nodes, i dont see why they wouldn't, so they're also helping enforce the rules placed on themselves
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @sommerfeld 5 Sep 2022 freebie
Miners could in theory collude and mine empty blocks or censor some transactions.
It would be against their economic incentive since they are not claiming those fees and the effect of such act would only last until an honest miner mines a block.
Without a sustained hash rate majority, miners cannot control anything in practice.
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