It's not the miners that count, rather than economic majority. It's a surprising fact, but here's how it works: lets imagine 75% of the miners decided they'd change the economic rules, in a protocol incompatible way. Result: the miners form a new alt-coin with no users. Bitcoin difficulty adjusts, and carries on as if nothing happened. The hostile miners earn 25 forkcoins which have a market price of 0. They are burning electricity so they either go bankrupt or the give up and rejoin the network. There's a lot to game theory that is subtle. It could do with a FAQ writing on it really. Adam On 28 June 2015 at 23:04, Sean Lynch <seanl@literati.org> wrote:
By the way, "consensus" is a red herring thrown out by those who never want there to be a fork. There can never be consensus for a fork, because otherwise it wouldn't be a fork. Claiming there needs to be consensus is just a way to try to make it look like any fork is somehow unilateral and undemocratic. But to succeed, any fork by definition needs broad support. In fact, it's about the most democratic you can get: people put their money and their mining power on the fork they want. It's those opposing any fork who are the authoritarians. Obviously, when you consider who's making the death threats.