Bitcoinocracy is immune to Sybil attack, because you must prove ownership of BTC to participate.

Consider.it is so open to Sybil attack it might as well be a honeypot.

The former is signal, the latter is noise.

You're just butthurt the deep pockets support continued consensus more than contentious hard forking.

If Bitcoinocracy was in favor of Gavinista governance coups and contentious hard forks, you'd never shut up about what the "community" wants/demands/deserves.

IMO Bitcoinocracy, consider.it, and every other voting platform out there to get people's opinion are terrible polls and are vulnerable to many different sources of bias.

They are all volunteer samples, so really it will only get people who care very strongly one way or the other to actually respond. You aren't going to get the opinion of the average bitcoin user but rather of people strongly in favor or strongly against. It isn't representative of what the population really thinks and thus it isn't consensus

Those platforms are vulnerable to sybil attacks, though Bitcoinocracy less so. People can make multiple fake accounts and thus submit fake votes making one option more popular than it really is. Bitcoinocracy combats that by requiring that people sign messages with addresses so it really is based on how many coins. But that gives unequal weighting to the votes, although I suppose that is a better representation of the economic majority.

The questions asked in those polls are not without bias. The way that the questions are phrased typically imply one meaning or the other, kind of making people want to vote one way or the other. The questions should instead be neutral and bias free to get the most unbiased responses. Also, the questions should provide information for people to read about what those changes are actually for and how they will work so that people actually know what they are voting for. The information should of course be unbiased, but that information is not available in the polls.

In any scientific study, just having one of the above biases would invalidate the entire study. Therefore, since any online voting platform has those biases in them, the entire voting thing and checking those sites for the supposed consensus is invalid and thus should not be considered or referenced when discussing consensus among the population.

And I was so hoping we could discuss the following:


So just to be clear - do you maintain that block size increases are necessarily "Removing the rules against actions that the network protocol expressly forbids", and are therefore necessarily evil?


- Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html


For better or worse (I would say for worse), in this era of industrial mining, non-mining nodes have essentially zero power. Any viable mining operation has sufficient  resources to run a node of its own, and connect explicitly to other mining entities that share its philosophy. The only power outside of miners is the threat that users abandon the chain en masse.

Perhaps it might be bad, because they might work in their favor only. But it is more stable that way, so it cannot be altered by odd-thinking people.

I think its safe to say non-mining nodes *never* had any power. In the white paper the word 'node' was synonymous with the word 'miner'. It's only over time that this 'node/miner' separation has arisen.

Bitcoin is defined by hashrate, and the arguments (from all sides, me included heh) that something else *should* matter seem a bit petulant!

The industrialisation of mining has happened exactly as predicted. The mechanisms to keep the big guys check are still there. One of which I think is exactly what you describe the threat that they cannot do anything that would cause user's to abandon it.

Miner's and users are the yin and yang of the network. Developers and non-mining nodes grease the wheels but ultimately have no power.

The code's out of the bag so to speak. If the chinese miners decide they want 2MB, even if they don't use Classic, or BU, they could always just roll their own.

but ... that ... is just untrue; it reflects a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is. The design of the bitcoin system deeply constrains miners-- and doing so is precisely how it creates economic incentives to keep them honest in the other ways it needs them to be.  Miners cannot mine except in conformance with the rules imposed by the users of the system: it's physically impossible for them to break them.

I was hoping someone would tell me.

Of course greg! Of course "it's physically impossible for them to break" the rules. Thats why you change the rules, and then allow the nodes ( in the white paper sense) to vote with their hashpower on what will constitute the fabled state of zen consensus. Isn't that they way its supposed to be? Dont nodes choose the rules?

Not really constrained, deeply or otherwise.