My main reason to oppose the IFP

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Avatar for saddit42
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4 years ago

FWIW here's the ~10000th article about the IFP. For now I only saw Jonald Fyookball making this point and as I think it's the most important reason to oppose the fund I'll expand on it a bit:

Blockchains are social coordination tools and their incorruptible properties are not magically forming out of nowhere but are emerging from certain strong agreements on simple truths shared by the people supporting and using them.

For this to work and be resilient against corruption and capture these truths must be easy and somewhat absolute/pure so they can not get more and more corrupted over time until they've completely vanished.

One such simple truth is: There will never be more than 21 million coins! Who cares if miners change it to be 21.0000001? Me! because breaking that magic number would open the doors for endless inflation.

It is not that miners wouldn't technically be able to change that limit and force higher block rewards with a 51% hashrate majority.. no, it's the fact that big parts of the community agree on this simple truth that would make it very hard, even for a hashrate majority, to get something like this pushed through.

Another simple truth for me always was that blocks will not get censored by a 51% majority because they contain transactions that - while otherwise being perfectly valid - do not pay money to the right set of people! This is terrible.. and a very important line would've been crossed!

How about orphaning the spending of some hacked coins next time? sounds reasonable.. or not? So if we now orphaned blocks with tx that spend hacked coins, why not also freeze money of criminals?

These are all things miners could rightfully decide with their Hashrate.. But I think it would be a very stupid decision and it would certainly lower my excitement for such a project.

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Even cryptocurrency has its flaws too. Im still new in cryptocurrency, need to know more. Thanks fo informative article.

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User's avatar Great_Influence
3 years ago

These are all things miners could rightfully decide with their Hashrate..

It used to be the case (and still is largely is for BTC) that miners had an incentive to not do stupid things that hurt the value of the coin they mine (like the examples of eroding the core values you give): if the value of the coin they mine erodes, so does their profit and the value of their investment. This is precisely the case because sha256 mining hardware is useless for anything but mining that one chain.

I think it's a huge problem that this is not the case for a minority chain like BCH: that sha256 hardware investment ist still as valuable as before even if the value of the minority coin goes to 0 because it can still be used to mine the majority chain. So miners really suffer no loss of investment value or operating profit if they screw up the value of a minority chain. They have no skin in the game, so to say.

Thus it's easy and pretty much risk-free for miners to fuck around with the consensus rules. They don't suffer the consequences.

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User's avatar molecular
4 years ago

I think I need to add something to this: Voting is cheap. Actual enforcement is expensive.

It's, as you said, almost risk-free to "vote" one way or another on a minority chain; enforcing that decision is expensive, any wrong bet and it's money down the drain. Hence mechanisms that depend on "voting" gets really bad on minority chains - not only do "voters" easily have somewhere to retreat to, they don't even have much cost before they retreat.

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User's avatar im_uname
4 years ago

hmm, a miner enforcing ifp and orphaning a non-ifp block could then get orphaned himself by another non-ifp block being mined on top of the one he just orphaned. is that what you mean? I hadn't actually realized that in full. safer to just follow the longest chain?

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User's avatar molecular
4 years ago

Yes. A controversial soft fork is a de facto hashwar, which nobody really wants; the risk of that happening by accident or malice is much higher on a minority chain. Following longest chain has less risk, especially as a merchant.

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User's avatar im_uname
4 years ago

Thank you for your work on lazyfox. We shall prevail, and prosper, and nobody is irreplaceable.

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User's avatar im_uname
4 years ago

The slippery slope argument is for chains that do not do upgrades to achieve the dream of Bitcoin. We have already exercised that power. The "simple truth" is not as simple as we all want it to be. On BCH we have checks and balances and developers and miners who know they should not exercise their superpowers to do bad things. That would be bad for BCH. Instead they do things they believe are good and the community supports them.

In the current case, miners are trying to set up an automated donation of money they have already earned to our developers to make BCH better. Many opposed to letting the miners donate are making a lot of BS arguments and good ones to try to divide the community. The anti-BCH forces are all out taking advantage of any real disagreements to fan the flames for another split. Fooling people into thinking this is about something other than miners trying to donate to developers is a huge part of the attack this time.

Ya, the way this is getting done sucks. The real question for me is if this plan would be good for BCH if we ignore the BS and noise trying to split our community.

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User's avatar Big-Bubbler
4 years ago

The same slippery slope fallacy that small block fanatics used against raising the block size limit.

The truth is - miners operate exactly the same way and can do exactly the same things that the executives of any other company can do. Deal with it.

There will be dev budget, there will be inflation, there will be censorship - if the shareholders want it. If you don't like it you are free to create your irrelevant ethereum classic.

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User's avatar tula_s
4 years ago
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