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by thruway516 1663 days ago
'Policy changes' and hard forks have about as much to do with PoW as whether the Federal authorities should ban cryptocurrencies or not - they're outside the realm of consensus algorithms. In PoW there are no friends. If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid and will be rejected by the rest of the network.
1 comments
derefr 1663 days ago
> If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid

If your chain tip is on the dead side of a hard fork (i.e. if the majority of the network will predictably soon finish switching away from software which considers your chain tip valid, to software which considers your chain tip invalid), then nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the interrim, or how long you still hold out running the software that considers your chain tip valid. Your side of the fork no longer holds any economic value as a platform for transactions, so nobody will participate in it. You'll just be out there mining blocks all alone, blocks that say you earn all the virtual tokens, but where those tokens are worthless on your side of the fork.

It's a bit like how, in old pre *serv IRC networks, in cases of netsplits, you could end up on a partition of the network where you were the only one in a previously-moderated channel; and so you could effectively do whatever you wanted in that channel. But it didn't really matter, because nobody could hear you.

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thruway516 1663 days ago
Um, yes. I should have phrased that as 'your transactions based on it are invalid in the network'. You just described consensus working correctly, but like I said hard-forks and policy changes are outside the scope of PoW, so saying PoW does not handle hard-forks is not really a valid criticism of PoW.
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larsrc 1663 days ago
"nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the interrim,"

Except the people you bought something real-world from, once they figure out that their "tipcoin" is worthless. So now it's a question of convincing some people that your technobabble is valid enough. How hard is that?

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