@sickpig It's about what the law deems to be specific design to enable something versus a generic set of building blocks. General purpose computers can also do malicious things, but only a rig judged to be purpose-built for malicious activity is targeted. A CNC machine can be used to make a gun, but only one deemed to specifically facilitate gun-making is outlawed. A chemistry set may allow a bomb to be made, but ones that allow it to be a thousand times easier are much more likely to attract regulatory attention.
I have been surprised to find, contrary to my initial ideas that Bitcoin was built with the expectation that it would always live in the crosshairs, that Bitcoin and script as a system seem carefully designed to avoid a host of pretty specific legal pitfalls, either coincidentally or by design. This assumption of basic incompatibility with government from the start, although never stated by Satoshi except as incompatibility with
big government ("attractive to the libertarian point of view"), has informed many design ideas and may need to be reconsidered.
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@Zangelbert Bingledack, I'm curious about your stance on BSV's threats to 51% any other fork of BCH, and their campaign to keep people from splitting their coins.
You were one of the most eloquent writers about the wonders of market competition between forks, and how this would result in the best coin winning. You were also a huge supporter of user choice. BSV warnings about the dangers of splitting seem like a desperate attempt to keep the battle out of the market and to make it harder for users to choose the fork that they prefer. Any thoughts on that?
A position I've held since before BCH forked away from BTC is that it would be in the best interests of any diehard BTC miners to try to kill BCH.
In general, a minority chain is an existential threat as it could come back to attack the current majority chain, so arguably miners would be remiss to let it live. I don't think that alters the benefits of fork arbitrage, but it does seem to limit its application to situations where either the PoW is changed or the majority miners are merciful. (If the miner-disfavored chain can be rendered nonfunctional whether by malicious reorgs, continual empty blocks, or transaction poisoning like nChain threatens, there can be no arbitrage trade other than of notional coins. Naturally some or all these squelching measures could backfire if they are deemed immoral or damaging to the money system or usability - poisoning transactions is an especially radical move that I intend to cover subsequently.)
That should answer the immediate question, but to give broader context on my views around market governance, the biggest factors I have updated on are:
1) As markets can be irrational in the short term, the fork arbitrage process can take years to play out (not mere minutes/hours as I had thought) as BCH, assuming it eventually succeeds, would demonstrate.
2) Miners, having large sunk costs into a specific hashing algorithm, seem to have more incentive to steward the chain over the long term than investors who can jump in and out.
Taken together, I weight miners a lot more heavily as a specific type of investor than I did before, especially miners that are willing to take heavy short-term losses in pursuit of long-term gains.
This implies miners and broader investors may be at odds and in fact often are. For example, today most BCH holders probably still consider Bitcoin Cash just another altcoin, worth somewhere between EOS and Ripple, while most BCH miners probably hold a radically different view.
Ideally miners, having skin in the game that cannot be easily removed for a few years, serve as a safeguard against the vicissitudes of the investing public until a future time when the investment markets have matured to such a degree that they are rational even on shorter timescales (though even in the most mature markets, like stocks, this still isn't the case - "in the short term the market is a popularity contest, in the long term it is a weighing machine").
To bring this back to SV miners specifically, if they are convinced they know better than the market in the short term and they either have hash majority/supermajority or are willing to take a lot of pain, it is in their interests to thwart any split attempt, even though that is arguably at odds with the interests of investors in the near term seeking fork arbitrage.
Calvin certainly understands the dynamic. Whether it is a bluff or a real commitment remains to be seen: