Its the other way round -- nothing forces nodes to accept bad blocks from miners. An honest node would simply ignore the bad data. The exchanges run nodes, so I would rather be generating or receiving transactions on a chain (or fork) that its users are engaging with. Nodes accept blocks from miners, miners don't accept blocks from nodes.
Isn’t there an incentive to run a node for privacy? With your own node you are not leaking your xpub and you don’t leak your transactions by staring at them on a block explorer
Wouldn't your own node unless properly hidden be higher chance of leaking your transactions? As I would expect them to come from your own node... Ofc, tracking the ones made from other services sure it is safer.
>Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.
I deleted a previous reply to you because I think I may have misunderstood what you wrote. In any case, are you saying the majority of miners have the ultimate control of the protocol rules of the cryptocurrency?
Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder) majority is an extremely important part of it.
>Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder) majority is an extremely important part of it.
In 2017, the majority of miner hashpower wanted to change the Bitcoin protocol to increase 1MB blocksize to 2MB but the SegWit2x failed to be adopted. What's your interpretation of that event?
They signaled support for it, but when push came to shove, they bailed.
I'm not saying 51% of miners decide what the rules are. Suppose you had a Bitcoin fork that had 80% of the hashrate. How long would that situation need to persist until the major network participants decide to call that fork "Bitcoin"?
