A little backstory to propose my point if you will...
In colonial Delhi India, they had too many cobras in the streets, so the British colonialists offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in.... It worked...
Then the people started breeding cobras lol, the government could see the people were gaming the system, so they cancelled the scheme
Then the breeders released their worthless snakes into the streets and Delhi ended up with more cobras than before it started lol
Economists since then famously called this the cobra effect
You don't get the behavior you want, you get the behavior you measure
After seeing this absolutely brilliant representation of game theory in a real life example, I couldn't help but align it with the latest going on over at the latest bitcoin fork
Was one of the main reasons for their forking off to 'fire the miners' and their change to a different pow?
But it transpires that their new pool of miners are not acting as decentralised as first thought
The distribution of mining power seems to have pooled to the few rather than the many
There's been some discussions on X with different parties debating the other of differing claims
There was talk of redefining what amount of power the miners can hold
But as my introduction suggests, if you give people a game, they are going to play it, and when you add a financial incentive it becomes even more attractive to participate
I think when Satoshi released Bitcoin in 09, he did face a few challenges but because it was so unknown, arguably Satoshi had the advantage to get the timechain running before anyone realised what was happening
And in this new fork's case, they are cold starting into an ecosystem that is well versed in mining infrastructure, and there are numerous interested parties capable of arbing this opportunity
So unfortunately it's of no surprise they are facing difficulties
And full disclosure, I have no interest in that chain, if there a drastic change in price over the coming months, years, maybe I'd be incentivised to look at splitting coins, but as it stands I'm just an interested observer
so what it shows is a fundamental problem exists, on their chain, and on this chain too ?- not sure why people are unconcerned by this - plenty of blather about pandering to miners re 'security budget' , but i don't get a sense of concern about mining centralisation in wider discussion of bitcoin at all - not sure if it's complacency, or lack of ideas to solve/mitigate it
I agree that watching this fork is interesting. For many years, bitcoiners have occasionally raised the idea of a PoW change as a last ditch effort to break a large miner attack, but we are now seeing all the complications that come with it.
Choosing the new algo was a mess. They tried to use random data from testnet but that was clearly a poor choice
Now they've got a big mining pool and they expected the miner to selflessly "do the right thing" which in this case was reducing hash rate. If security relies on altruism, you have a big problem.
So now they say they are gonna fire this miner and they have all sorts of plans for changing the rules around when block rewards mature (I believe they are planning on making it 45 days rather than the 100 blocks it currently is).
I have a feeling this is going to end up like cobras faster than they think.
I also think this has some pretty serious implications for our own confidence in a PoW change as a defense against a hostile miner takeover. It might not be as viable as previously considered.
Nice story about Delhi. The British dod a lot many things that backfired.
Does Like have British descent in any way?