The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Immutability, Bugs, and Social Consensus

  • The overflow bug shows “immutable” ledgers depend on human coordination: Satoshi shipped a fix in hours and the network effectively rolled back.
  • Some see this as proof that consensus is ultimately social, with code and PoW just tools for coordination.
  • Others argue this was a one‑time early event; today there’s no single figure with comparable authority, and changes require broad economic consensus.

Decentralization, Leadership, and 51% Power

  • Debate over whether having a de facto lead maintainer or core team undermines decentralization.
  • Distinction drawn between leadership by consent vs coercion: users can always reject new software or fork.
  • Clarification that 51% hashpower mainly enables censorship and double-spends, not arbitrary rule changes or coin reassignment; protocol rules live in the node software.
  • Others counter that both software and mining centralization are real attack surfaces, including geopolitical concentration of hashpower.

Forks, Ethereum DAO, and “Code Is Law”

  • Bitcoin’s fix is contrasted with Ethereum’s DAO rollback: Bitcoin invalidated an obviously invalid state; Ethereum explicitly reversed specific transactions.
  • One side calls the Ethereum rollback hypocritical relative to “code is law”; others note that dissenters preserved the original rules as Ethereum Classic.
  • Multiple comments stress that all blockchains are governed by human norms; immutability holds only until enough stakeholders choose to fork.

Consensus Mechanisms and Scientific Merit

  • Some dismiss Bitcoin as “social consensus plus a Rube Goldberg machine”; others defend Nakamoto consensus as a significant advance: permissionless, byzantine-tolerant consensus without a fixed validator set.
  • Long subthread compares PoW/longest-chain consensus to earlier BFT/PBFT/Paxos work, emphasizing:
    • Prior algorithms assumed known participants (permissioned).
    • Bitcoin trades efficiency and deterministic finality for openness and probabilistic finality.
  • Disagreement over whether forks and lack of hard finality are “design flaws” or inherent to permissionless systems.

Quantum Threat and Upgradeability

  • Some claim Bitcoin will “certainly” be upgraded to post‑quantum cryptography via distributed consensus; skeptics argue that’s not a simple protocol tweak.
  • Concerns include: migrating billions in cold storage, hardware wallets and HSMs becoming obsolete, and stranded/lost coins becoming easy targets.
  • Others point to proposed constructions that let existing coins be safely moved, but acknowledge a messy economic and logistical transition.

Economic and Distributional Issues

  • Hypotheticals: 184B coins would likely have crashed Bitcoin in 2010; several note that face value is meaningless without liquidity.
  • One long comment (disputed by others) portrays Bitcoin as highly unequal: many coins lost, large early hoards, whales, banks, and criminals dominating ownership, with little everyday transactional use.
  • Counterpoints: lost coins are analogous to destroyed cash; fighting inequality was never Bitcoin’s primary design goal; and mining was once feasible on consumer hardware, though that’s no longer true at scale.

Governance, Power, and Identity of “Real Bitcoin”

  • Repeated theme: “real Bitcoin” is whatever chain most users, miners, exchanges, and merchants converge on.
  • That convergence is a social process; protocol parameters could in theory change, but any version perceived as inflating supply or violating core norms would likely be abandoned and thus economically worthless.