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SegWit2X has been called a short-sighted & severely lacking proposal. There is nearly universal preference for its alternative among those listed on the segwit support overview (SegWit, BIP 141,148,149).
Yet SegWit2X has 90% mining support.
Is this because the vast majority of Bitcoin mining / hashing power is concentrated in a few hands? Does this mean that those who control the mining power can get whatever they want?
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I feel that the existing answers here fail to highlight that while (the collection of) miners have the authority to select the order of transactions, and impose additional validity rules, they do not have the authority to determine what the rules are.
Segwit2X (in my understanding, there seem to be multiple ideas out there) seems to be a combination of a soft fork (activating SegWit) and a plan to do a hard fork later (changing some resource limits). The first is something that miners can do, but the second will only be accepted by full nodes that implement the same rules, and be ignored by everyone else.
1
The only answer can be "yes" and "no".
https://twitter.com/barrysilbert/status/876041414412562432
Chinese miners representing over 80% of bitcoin network hash rate have reconfirmed their support for SegWit2x
This is an interesting one because the 14 pools they list vary from Bitmain (Antpool) with ~17% of the total network hashrate, to people like 1Hash with <1%.
https://blockchain.info/pools Shows 4 pools (Antpool, BTC.TOP, F2Pool, BTC.com) have more than 50% of the hashrate. If you include 3 more (BTCC, Bixin, BW) you're at ~70%. AFAICT none of these will let the users decide how they vote*, after these pools is Slush (~4.8% over last few days) which allows miners to choose what to "signal" via the coinbase transaction.
As Pieter Wuille points out, they can agree on what software to run, but they don't have the authority to change the protocols, there is nobody to "allow" or "disallow" it, they do as they like, the markets will decide if their coin is worth buying.
*F2Pool is interesting, as they did poll users to see whether they should signal SegWit, after the vote they started signalling, but this is superseded by SegWit2x.
Is it fair to say the parties of NYAgreement (most mining pools, RSK, Bloq, et al.) could cause a hard fork, resulting in two competing Bitcoin blockchains, similar to Ethereum Classic and Ethereum? At which point Bitcoin users will have to choose which blockchain to participate in? – Baker – 2017-07-03T03:53:28.020
That's certainly a possible, possibly likely scenario. Once a hard fork like that happens, you need to choose which side you want to be on. Potential chaos for wallets and service providers like exchanges. – Daniel Morritt – 2017-07-03T12:26:36.353
0
This sounds like a fairly standard sort of split for any compromise.
Let's say that there are two groups with two different opinions on an issue. Group 1 prefers solution A, will accept solution B, and hates solution C. Group 2 prefers solution C, will accept solution B, and hates solution A.
If you ask everyone which solution they prefer, 0% will answer "solution B". However, solution B is the one that wins out with nearly 100% begrudging support. This sort of support breakdown does not require collusion in order to happen.
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The strength of the current Protestant Bitcoin split has nothing to do with the strength of their miners—it lies solely with the strength of ⨕ their end users.
A currency is as strong as the strength of the group accepting it as payment, not the strength of the group producing it.
Even if a branch has 100.00% of mining strength, they can't win if the strength of the group accepting that branch is weaker.
(Just consider what would happen if all the world governments decide to accept using Orthodox Bitcoin. The Protestant miners could continue mining all they want, but the coin that more people accept will soon be the one with the higher price. In fact, this is true even after a coin has "died". It can be resurrected years/centuries later by any strong group that accepts it as payment.)
@NickODell, I see you go around downvoting my posts, which is fine, but you'll need to back your troll downvotes with a comment to refrain rational parties from referring to your actions as troll. – Pacerier – 2017-10-27T14:04:19.627
It's not clear why you added the "⨕ ", or whom you are referring to as "Protestant" without further clarification. As far as I'm aware, Protestant is a term exclusively used to refer to branches of the Christian faith, specifically ones that split away from Catholicism. I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve by using these terms since they are neither unambiguous nor perceived as neutral. It seems unreasonable to call out a specific user on a hunch, when there are more than 1100 users that can issue a downvote.
@Murch, 'term's used in contrast to the Orthodox Bitcoin. Assigning names to phrases that are often repeated makes conversation more succinct and efficient—what was done in 10 words can be reduced to 1. ¶ It's unreasonable not to call NickODell out, considering the downvote was issued minutes right after I gave him the link. I'll retract the comment if he's innocent, but we all know it's him alright. – Pacerier – 2017-10-30T06:37:58.810
@Murch. Btw a quick primafacie investigation pulled out 66 suspects for interrogation, not 1100. There just aren't that many people on bitcoin.SE.
66 is still a lot more than 1. I have 1788 downvotes, how do you know it was not me? I'm here a lot and could have seen the post in the same timeframe. Besides, your last post with the Orthodox and Protestant terminology got four downvotes.— For the record, there are no serial voters showing up for your profile, so I think any downvotes this post is getting are probably related to this post's content. – Murch – 2017-10-30T12:41:13.127
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no, the segwit success (to be determined), is not due to centralization of miners, but due to cooperation between miners.
for reference, you can read up on the New York Agreement (NYA) to see under what forms the cooperation took place.
you may also wish to read up on the hong kong agreement, the bitcoin scaling debate, the blocksize limit controversy and the offchain solutions to get a better context for why the new york agreement was relevant to begin with.
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Whatever this group wants, it gets?
Yes. Everyone in bitcoin community has sold his vote to these persons.
By using cloud based hashing (hashnest, bitcoin.com, genesis mining etc to name a few of the less scammy ones that actually appear to be running mining operations) you are giving your vote to someone else. These providers will vote based on their own agenda, not on yours. – Daniel Morritt – 2017-07-02T12:18:26.647
Good point to bring up, that the hard fork will create an alternate Bitcoin blockchain that is up to the community to either use or ignore. Similar to ETC (Ethereum Classic) and Ethereum. – Baker – 2017-06-29T20:48:49.890