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47 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b OP 10 Jun \ parent \ on: Economic Bitcoin Nodes: Why You Need To Use Your Node For It To Matter bitcoin
I think you're thinking past each other. He's talking about consensus and not value - although they are definitely related in some way.
The examples he lays out, although they're a bit hard to follow, make it clearer. If you run a fork of bitcoin, and other people are agnostic about the change, unwilling to run the fork independent of doing business with you, and they don't do business with you, then you running the fork has no impact on consensus. You running the fork does not, by itself, do anything to cause consensus to change. It does not do anything to cause other node runners to run the fork. It does not cause, or even suggest, that miners should run the fork. It does not cause, or even suggest, that big and small economic nodes (like exchanges) should run the fork. Your impact on consensus is invisible.
If I show up to your store holding k00b credits in my wallet, and no one else has them, and I never exchange them or buy anything from you with them, or even ask you to accept them promising to buy something in the future with them, why would your store start accepting k00b credits?
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I will buy some off you. DM me.
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I guess the part I don't understand is this:
big and small economic nodes
Nodes don't technically contain any bitcoin nor are the responsible for any economic activity. They merely relay transaction and chainstate information. So I don't understand how a node can be "big" or "small".
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that your rules' influence on the network is proportional to your economic activity? (Replace the word node with the word rules)
And, in that sense, my argument was that a set of rules with worse properties is going to lose to a set of rules with better properties, even if the economic activity on worse rules was higher
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Whatever bitcoin node Cashapp uses to verify coins that are sent to it is a "big node" in the sense that has a lot of opportunities to reject coins that don't follow rules Cashapp thinks are bitcoin rules.
We all rely on a node (ours or someone else's) to make sure that coins we receive are following Bitcoin's rules. If you only receive a little bit of bitcoin every once in a while, your node is "small" in that not very much economic activity will be affected if you demand coins that follow a specific fork. If Cashapp only accepts coins that follow a specific fork, a lot of economic activity is affected.
Replacing node with rules doesn't quite describe what is happening. If someone keeps their coins at a custodian, they don't really have much say over consensus changes, even if they do have a lot of economic activity. Similarly, if a lot of people rely on a specific node (say Mempool.space's node) or a certain public electrum server, the rules those people care about may not have much relevance (unless they are willing to spin up their own node to make sure coins they receive follow such rules). I think it does make more sense to talk about nodes rather than rules here.
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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that your rules' influence on the network is proportional to your economic activity?
Yes.
And, in that sense, my argument was that a set of rules with worse properties is going to lose to a set of rules with better properties, even if the economic activity on worse rules was higher.
If you mean a set of rules can lose or gain value independent of economic activity, I see what you're saying. The good set of rules wins because, assuming rational actors, a greater volume of economic value will be transacted with those rules over time, correct?
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The good set of rules wins because, assuming rational actors, a greater volume of economic value will be transacted with those rules over time, correct?
Yes I'd agree with that
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