They think Satoshi was wrong

I've been really perplexed by the Bitcoin Core developers' positions lately, specifically wrt to a fork (or hard-fork as they call it.) They seem in stark contrast to my understanding of the system. Today I think I finally understand the issue and would like to point it out in the hopes of alleviating the confusion of others.

Apparently, the Core developers are operating under a not-often-spoken assumption that Satoshi was in fact wrong (about several things but specifically) about the issue of whether or not CPU power was meant to govern the Bitcoin system.

I take quotes from the white paper to illustrate why I think that was his intention:

The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU- one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

and:

Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

This makes sense to me. The point of the system is to eliminate the need for trust. The only trust required is that "honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes." At least, that's always been my interpretation which I'm willing to concede is flawed if I can be convinced.

Now how I discovered the aforementioned assumption. These are IRC logs from #bitcoin-wizards today:

adlai Guest2324: so, consensus in that quote refers to consensus over state, within a set of rules. the rules don't change, because you wouldn't know who to trust about which changes are good or bad.

adam3us Guest1234: it is a subtle point but actually it is the economically dependent full nodes that enforce consensus rules not miners; miners follow.

kanzure he was wrong. it turns out it's not about CPU power at all.

maaku Guest2324: satoshi was clueless about tons of shit

The above parties (with the possible exception of "adlai") were signers of the capacity roadmap letter. Now it makes perfect sense to me. They think Satoshi was wrong about the system so we have a fundamental disagreement. That's why it looks as if we will never be able to reconcile our mutually exclusive positions on the matter.

Hope this helps others.

Submitted January 01, 2016 at 08:08AM by back_of_the_envelope http://bit.ly/1Rcw1zM