Miners and Moon Kids, Oh My.
There’s never a dull day in Bitcoinland.
Of course all drama stems from our favorite collection of degenerates over at r/btc. Today, they erupted into a furious circlejerk over some random post on a Chinese BTC forum which details a plan to hardfork away from current consensus.
It’s call the “Terminator”, which appears to be a mining pool that is explicitly designed to run out of consensus code and push for a contentious hardfork.
Coincidentally, around the same time this post reached reddit, the bitcoin price started to move up. The moon kids instantly thought this was a sign delivered directly from the moon prophet himself and started claiming the market was speaking to them and there’s already growing support for the plan.
Unknown to moon kids, the PBOC just announced the Yuan will probably reach 6.8 by the end of the year and forex makets were dropping like a rock.
Of course any rational replies that refute their narratives, prompts a barrage of down-votes from the big-block hive mind. I found a few posts that sum up the situation nicely, however.
The meta drama aside, there’s a much bigger issue here, that should be discussed more.
Should miners push for hardforks?
Here’s an opinion.
I vote NO to all hardfork attempts, especially by miners and moon kids!
I happen to agree that there is a conflict of interest with miners pushing for hardforks and controlling the blocksize. Their incentives are pretty obvious, and they go directly against a decentralized network. Their profit motives will always put a strain on full-nodes which don’t get rewarded for validation.
What do you think? Is it healthy for a blockchain to bend to the whims of the miners?