Economics: On the nature, role, and relationship of miners vs nodes
jbouton: What is the nature, role, and relationship between miners and nodes? And how does this question help us weed out fakes?
27offsuit: One does the work and the other confirms and rewards the work?
jbouton: That's a great start. But do you mean to imply they are necessarily different or not the same entity, etc.?
jbouton: And who decides what 'valid' means in regard to confirming the work?
27offsuit: No idea.
jbouton: Awesome. We can all get to the bottom of it together.
27offsuit: Emergent consensus?
jbouton: How can this be? Quoting Satoshi: "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime." Source
jbouton: And consensus among whom?
An inquiry into the nature of the emergent consensus of the system we call bitcoin.
1 Reply
When bitcoin was created, when people were trying to implement a digital money in a meaningful way, it was understood that you need to solve the problem of being able to copy it. Its not enough to say you solved the double-spend problem.
As soon as bitcoin was birthed you could IMMEDIATELY copy and change it for your own version of the project.
People call alt-coins 'shitcoins'. Ignore them. Those are people that incorrectly believe there can only be one money. Thats stupid.
But we still need to ask and understand what is the difference between bitcoin and these other copies. If someone copies bitcoin and makes and improvement on it, then why should bitcoin exist?
Its important because you might have an entire thread here of alt-coin which is simply a cult community dedicated to promoting and discussing scams.
