Bitcoin' s proof of work is about continuing to work when some miners are malicious. If you are happy assuming they are not malicious, then you can use a separate system where a federation of miners sign blocks. What do you think Bitcoin is better than such a such a federation?
I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here or how it follows from what we were discussing. I think Bitcoin's security model is generally understood to be premised on the assumption that a majority of the hash power is "honest." (E.g., from the white paper: "we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change
if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power.") More generally, you might say that it's premised on the assumption that a majority of the hash power will recognize their interest in preserving the health of the system (and thus won't do things like allowing Bitcoin's transactional capacity to be intentionally crippled). Of course
ultimately we rely on investors / "the market" to protect the integrity of the system. If a majority of miners are "dishonest" or otherwise act improvidently in a way that significantly depresses the value of the Bitcoin network, investors can respond by buying up hash power (at now-artificially-depressed prices) and righting the ship that way, or by choosing to value a fork that avoids the errors made by the foolish miners.
And BU can be divergent with itself, at least during some periods less than AD
The tool that BU provides
could be used in a manner that is
slower to converge as compared to a network consisting of 100% Core nodes (or 100% BU nodes using identical settings). However, extending a chain that's doomed to be orphaned (because it's out of step with the current consensus regarding block size) is a very expensive mistake to make. And mining is a very competitive industry. Thus, miners who repeatedly make that mistake are unlikely to be around for very long.
Having said that, because BU allows you to set an AD up to 999,999 (about 19 years worth of blocks), it could be used by some miners (presumably the insane or extremely masochistic) in a manner that would be
practically "divergent" (although this would obviously be
very ill-advised). But then again, aren't you the same jonny1000 who said:
"I will never run BU unless there is an infinity option in there"? So I'd gotten the impression that you
liked divergence?
