Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step

[Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil.org>]

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On 06/02/2015 04:03 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:
>
>      1,000 *people* in control vs. 10 is two orders of
>
>     magnitude more decentralized. 
>
>
> Yet Bitcoin has got worse by all these metrics: there was a time
> before mining pools when there were ~thousands of people mining with
> their local CPUs and GPUs. Now the number of full nodes that matter
> for block selection number in the dozens, and all the other miners
> just follow their blocks blindly.

A mining pool is not a person, a full node is not a miner, and
cooperation is not control.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/number-of-bitcoin-miners-far-higher-than-popular-estimates/

The entire Bitcoin ecosystem cooperates, that is what consensus means.
Establishing proof of that cooperation is the purpose of Bitcoin.

Decentralization is about keeping control out of the hands of the state
(any entity that would substitute violence for consensus). Nobody has
the power to compel the cooperation of individual miners in a pool. When
state power is applied to a pool operator the miners (people) retain
their vote.

e


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