You can't disentangle the two. Proof of work just makes a block chain hard to tamper with. What it contains is arbitrary. Honest miners build a block chain that's intended to stop double spending. Dishonest miners don't. They're both engaging in proof of work, to different ends.

 

No, let's not. Your definition of "smart miner" is one I'd called "stupid miner" (or possibly "short bitcoin miner"). They are miners who would reduce the value of their coins, by making their own system less useful. That's not smart, that's simply short termism taken to an extreme, sort of like a business owner who puts so much pressure on his employees they all quit. He might have gained a bit more profit in the short term, but only at the cost of destroying his business that would have given lower but sustainable returns over the long term.

 

Peter always says this too, but it's again an incorrect position. This is not an argument from authority.

Why are we here? We are here because we were brought together by shared goals.

What are those goals? They were defined at the start of the project by the creator of the project.

Why do we issue 21 million coins and not 42? Because 21 million is the goal everyone signed up for.

Why did everyone sign up for 21 million coins? Because that's what Satoshi picked.

If someone asked us to change from 21 to 42 million coins, we'd probably say no and the justification would be that this is the number we started with. That's not "argument from authority", it's just recognition that the parameters of a shared project has to be defined somehow, and for Bitcoin it was defined at the start.

Now the argument Gregory makes is that changing the block chain algorithm in this way would be a violation of the social contract. This is a generic outcome to be legitimately worried about - we don't want to change what Bitcoin is in ways that would dismay its users. That just leads to a fork.

I argue that this isn't such a change because it makes nothing possible that was previously impossible, it just makes it less disruptive, and the actual shared goal of Bitcoin is not "preserve the block chain algorithm exactly as found in v0.1" but rather "stop double spending".

You are arguing elsewhere that Bitcoin should allow double spending for a fee. That would be a clear violation of the social contract! 

 

Right, but I don't accept this definition of honesty. That's not a definition any man on the street would use:

  

    "If you pay for something with forged bank notes and walk out immediately, you are honest. But if you pay for something with forged bank notes and hang around for longer than 10 minutes, you are dishonest"

That would sound silly to anyone because what's so special about 10 minutes? It's the act of passing counterfeit money and stealing from the merchant that's the dishonest act, how long it takes is irrelevant.

In Bitcoin, the dishonest act by the user is signing for the same output twice (ignoring special protocols here), and the dishonest act by the miner is deviating from normal behaviour for a fee to try and trick the recipient into believing they have been paid. The exact details are something computer scientists care about, but the average Bitcoin user would not.

 

Indeed and that's why we have these threads! These are fundamental issues that simply must be debated.