[Nursie]

> It's much more than exchanges and miners as exemplified by the 2017 block size war, won by the users.

Was it? Did you get to vote on that? Or was it decided by a handful of pools and large players?

> The scenario you are describing - while possible in principle - is unlikely.

Whether it's likely or not is beside the point. It's possible in theory, therefore (and this is my main point here) the digital scarcity of bitcoin is not some emergent mathematical property of the universe, it's a social phenomenon.

However unlikely, it only takes a critical mass of people to change their minds and it can be changed. The article talks about this property as if it is something akin to a hard universal property or mathematical axiom, but it's not, it's a very human property and very malleable as a result.

[New_California]

> Whther it's likely or not is beside the point. It's possible in theory, therefore (and this is my main point here) the digital scarcity of bitcoin is not some emergent mathematical property of the universe, it's a social phenomenon.

Correct.

> Was it? Did you get to vote on that? Or was it decided by a handful of pools and large players?

Yes, I got to vote on that with the economic full nodes I ran.

[CyberDildonics]

Nodes don't vote on anything. You can spin up as many nodes as you want, they aren't an authority on how to order the transactions, only the miners do that.

[Vecr]

Yeah, but if they publish non-standard blocks your nodes will reject them. What miners can do to their blocks is very limited.

[CyberDildonics]

If the other miners accept those block and keep building on the chain, then that's the chain. Thinking that non mining nodes do anything is like not watching a TV show and pretending you canceled it from being made anymore. It's absurd. I don't know where people have gotten this idea that nodes do anything but help broadcast the chain decided by the miners.