Nick Szabo  🔑

You are treading in dangerous waters @Hasu In practice I think you're right that some form of community governance will happen in that situation if the situation is catastrophic and a large enough percentage of the community is affected.

It won't be framed as such though - there will be one group shouting "consensus is decided by nodes/users so it's OK to re-org using a snapshot" and another group shouting "Nakamoto consensus is king" plus a contentious fork.

What about immutability? All this years preaching the dogma and now let's use social consensus to decide what chain we like?

Radical immutability serves no purpose. Bitcoin is a tool made by humans to serve humans. If it stops being useless, we need to be able to change it (and we are - we can always move to an identical copy without e.g. a bug)

"Serves no purpose"?! WTF?! Good grief you are one of these vile creatures: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/hello-kitty-people.html … You have outed yourself as an enemy of Bitcoin security. Blocked.

I feel like I more-agree-than-disagree with the comment you're replying to. And I love Hello Kitty. Am I an enemy of Bitcoin security? I actually feel like my position (socially rejecting day-long 51% attacks ) if adopted would *increase* Bitcoin's security...

I think the idea is that once you allow yourself to entertain the idea of social recovery after a 51% attack, you immediately invite the barbarians at the gate to come in and turn your cryptocurrency into a government controlled inflation fest, you thus make the system less safe.

The less snarky version is that a strong precomitment to immutability protects you against far more realistic threats than a 51% attack, and for that commitment to be strong and credible, it needs to be unconditional.