It's good to see some serious competition to core even though it's ramping up in response to a non problem.
Mempool is simply a transaction marketplace, it needs to offer parity with consensus rules or it will be obsoleted by a market that does.
Developers and miners and the overwhelming majority of node runners have no hard power over the protocol anyway.
Hard power lies with the set of people who run a node AND receive bitcoin in exchange for something else.
Since we bitcoiners produce close to 0% of the products and services in the global economy, bitcoin is acting as a financial instrument within the fiat economy and NOT as an alternative to it.
Hard power over the protocol mostly lies with financial players like exchanges, ETFs, and companies like microstrategy, because they receive (and validate) the most bitcoin in exchange for something else (a bit of paper, a trading account balance, etc).
Replies (13)
few.
MicroStrategy and the ETFs don’t have protocol-level power because they don’t actually do shit with Bitcoin. They don’t mine, don’t run consensus-critical infrastructure, and don’t validate payments in exchange for real-world goods or services. They’re just large passive receivers of Bitcoin, acting as financial wrappers for fiat capital.
gotta keep the fighting spirit alive
can't let muscle get weak
gunna need in much bigger way soon no doubt
They don't run a node to validate the coins they are buying?
“Since we bitcoiners produce close to 0% of the products and services in the global economy, bitcoin is acting as a financial instrument within the fiat economy and NOT as an alternative to it.”
. . . so far.
“Hard power over the protocol mostly lies with financial players like exchanges, ETFs, and companies like microstrategy, because they receive (and validate) the most bitcoin in exchange for something else.”
. . . why to increase decentralization.
they dont buy any bitcoin theyre custodian does
And if the custodian says the bitcoin they received is real, but it is in fact BSV, microstrategy is OK with that?
They run nodes for validation but that doesn’t have any economic weight since they are not broadcasting transactions
Let me be clearer: they are definitely watching someone else hold their bag, but that doesn’t give them protocol power. Anyone can spin up a node to watch. Those nodes have no say over the mempool.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
It does in fact give them power over the protocol. Their power comes from deciding which protocol to follow. If you want what they are selling (USD in this case) then you need to provide bitcoin that follows what *they* decide the protocol is.
The set of market participants on that side of the trade have 100% of the hard power over the protocol.
The trade doesn't settle unless the node used for validation says the TX complies with the protocol. The receiver of the coins decides what protocol to follow, the sum total of everyone doing that determines what "bitcoin" is.
I think we need to differentiate between consensus and mempool policy here. Also the scenario of a fork has a bit of nuance.
First… yes you’re right they totally will prevent anyone from giving them non consensus coins. So that’s an anchor of sorts against an unlikely scenario but only really relevant to their counterparty for that particular transaction- they still don’t influence policy at the protocol level.
They have a political voice for sure, but I’m not sure how relevant it is in the current debate since they don’t really USE the protocol. If anything, Saylor wants his “New York Real Estate” thesis to come true for block space so he’d be all for OP_RETURN expansion.
Again if there was a proposed fork- they might have a strong political voice but if you game out the mechanics of how this would go down their node has no influence at a protocol level. Where they might have influence is having a huge bag of forked coins to dump into the market…
