Thread

I tried yelling the “economic weight” bit into the void a while back and got nowhere lol. I hope this hits 🫡

I’ve never understood this. So what happens if a big govt spins up 1M nodes and then sends btc back and forth?

No one is buying anything from the government in that situation, so there are no goods or services to withhold if the transaction is invalid, so the government has no power over anything in that situation, they're a NPC.

Totally get what you’re saying! Bitcoin really relies on its active users to keep things authentic. It’s all about real value and trust in the network. Love the insights! 💪🚀

exactly. trust emerges from countless small validations, like pixels forming an image. while everyone debates nodes, i'm building proof through permanent strokes at pixel.xx.kg - each one a tiny testament to real human coordination.

Mining helps too. More people should be mining.

Miners provide immutability as a service, they don't have any hard power over the protocol.

This would only work if the objective was to destroy Bitcoin. If the objective is to steal Bitcoin, the cost of doing all that work would exceed the value of what can be stolen.

Mining is not profitable at current electricity cost where I live. I still plan to do it, for education purposes. ;-)

That government loses money. Admittedly, that seems to be what they do anyway. :-)

I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, I'm just pointing out who actually holds the hard power over the bitcoin protocol.

Bitcoin does not have a universal definition It usually converges to what the economic majority pushes as it would be disadvantageous to be on the losing side. But Bitcoin could also fragment into 20 distinct networks tomorrow due to some random incident and it would not be much different from how the world handles multiple currencies.

Immutability is pretty powerful and one of the assumptions. They can't force changes but they are more economically relevant, if only while the subsidy is over 1 whole coin.

At current prices they’d lose $.15 per transaction. So they do millions of transactions and fork the network. Why wouldn’t that work?

It wouldn't fork the network, they'd be the only ones on their fork regardless of how much wash trading they do with themselves.

The dollar provides the liquidity between each of them

How do you mean they'd lose 15 cents per transaction? The idea would be that they would mine blocks containing fake transactions transferring btc to themselves, but the cost of dominating honest minees would be more than they can steal.

The majority of miners hold the power. The cost of outmining them would exceed the value of the btc being stolen, because no-one would want their btc once the attack succeeds.

I mean at 1 sat / v byte they can send transactions for 15 cents (price fluctuates but prices keep trending down historically and I’ve sent at this cost recently). So they could keep this up for a while. I don’t understand this part of Bitcoin very well - the argument against spinning up and using nodes. My counter point was as much a question as a statement. Would like to learn more and was hoping you could explain why this wouldn’t work

Why do you think this would accomplish anything?

I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t. The argument was that nodes have to validate transactions to be relevant. So I said, ‘why cant they send transactions to themselves? It doenst cost much. Then they dominate the network and champion of a fork.’ I don’t know enough to know if this works. It is a question.

You need to be producing/trading something of value in exchange for bitcoin in order for your act of transaction verification to have an impact on the network. If the bitcoin you receive does not comply with your version of the protocol then verification fails and you stop providing economic value to whoever sent you the "bitcoin". The rolling set of people doing this determine what the protocol is.

The humans who are doing the _most work_ by far in the bitcoin system are those that are mining blocks. They mine by to convert electricity, work and ingenuity into bitcoin. Miners get bitcoin from the Coinbase reward and from fees that users submit when transacting. Spinning up, nodes without mining won't control the network.

This is true, but the nuance is that miners provide immutability as a service and don't actually have any power over the protocol.

The miners will mine chain that _the market_ values most. They will follow the value. The nodes pick/arive-at the protocol to run that maximizes the value. In this way yes, miners dont have power over the protocol

Also miners could collectively be _barely_ bitcoiners. They are just converting electricity to value, they could sell BTC immediately for fiat; and may not know anything about sound money or how the proof of work works or why. Crazy to think about the security of the system could be resting on unprincipled bitcoiners or even no-coiners 🤣

Not sure if you've seen this one but think you'll like it: https://youtu.be/X_xgmVLyB94

This is excellent. My two SATS: 1.) the individuals who are accepting bitcoin for something have performed real work, in the real world. They are then trusting that they can store this work for future use by exchanging it for BTC today. Work is always the base of the system: whether by miners or by buyers of BTC. 2.) Hoarders (HODLers) are using bitcoin and add significant value to the network. I'm storing my work, talent, ingenuity for future use: will exchange for something I need or pass it on to my tribe. Refusing to take fiat or inferior/low quality stuff for my coins is a forcing function: other humans must work harder/better, produce good stuff and/or bid up the fiat price. At the margins this is why NGU. This is my go to source for solid takes: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/im-hoarding-bitcoins-and-no-you-cant-have-any/

I like it