Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by weddpros 3149 days ago
Imagine you don't want a single person to control everything in your country (dictator), and you don't want a single person to control your currency.

Against dictators, we have democracy.

Against a centrally controlled currency, there's not much but crypto currencies. They're actually democratic, the majority wins.

Also, I don't want to be the one who will handle security for the single server with a Postgres database that has 100B$ in it. Do you? Do you want to be on call when the RAID array crashes or the datacenter goes dark?

I do believe there will be alternatives to proof of work, but a single database server isn't one of them.
1 comments
EliRivers 3149 days ago
They're actually democratic, the majority wins.

Majority of what? Not the demos, I bet; not so democratic. Majority of bitcoins? Majority of processing power?

link
psyc 3149 days ago
Bitcoin resists pithy statements about who has the power. Be skeptical of anyone trying to dumb it down to "it's the miners" or "it's the nodes". It's a complicated system of checks and balances, by design, and the fact that all of this was thought through in depth and then proven in practice is the reason we're having this thread today.

This essay does a decent job of summarizing the checks and balances:

https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/bitcoins-constitutional-cris...

link
weddpros 3149 days ago
Majority of participants in the network. I run a full node, I don't mine, but my voice counts. Of course I don't like the weight of huge mining farms, and I hope there will be viable alternatives to proof of work, to make BTC more democratic.

In the meantime, not a single country controls BTC, and even heavy weight miners can't decide unilaterally...

link
EliRivers 3149 days ago
Is it the majority of nodes, then? If I run ten nodes and you run one, I get ten times as many votes as you?
link
130434089 3149 days ago
Only miners really matter, if you only have a full node you don't have control over the network, just the ability to verify it. You will have to follow wherever the miners lead you.
link
weddpros 3149 days ago
The following is just my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong:

People don't connect directly to miners. They connect to nodes (8000+) which forward to miners. Nodes can declare an order is valid or invalid and they can blacklist bad-behaving miners. They can refuse nodes/miners that signal a change they don't agree with.

So I think full nodes are VERY important in the network and their voice counts. That's why I'm running one.

link