| This article repeats a common misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. Bitcoin's decentralization does not come from miners. It comes from the fact that users will not recognize blocks that do not follow the protocol rules, as being part of the blockchain. As a consequence, market participants will not pay as much for "bitcoins" that do not come from valid blocks. The fundamental service miners provide is that proof of work is used as a "tiebreak" so that bitcoin users can determine the "true" chain among all the chains that follow all the protocol rules. Miners really are just dumb utilities. A miner staying within the rules of the protocol can do two things that are negative. First, a denial of service attack by mining empty blocks or censoring transactions. Second, executing a "double spend" if he has more than 50% of the hash capacity. Those are serious considerations. But we cannot claim that bitcoin's decentralization is reducible to those two things. The current allocation of hash power among miners is actually far more distributed than what is really needed for bitcoin. Implicit in all the above is, miners do not "vote." That can be a helpful analogy, but it shouldn't be taken too far. |