Talk:Prohibited changes

Rationale behind my changes:

• Miners are not forced to accept the full subsidy under even the current rules. So decreases of total Bitcoins have already been done (both accidental and intentional) and there is no reason to even try forbidding further decreases.
• Block 1,890,000 would be half of 1953125 satoshis, which means half a satoshi is lost unless precision is improved. It makes no sense to forbid improving precision to avoid a subsidy change before block 6,930,000.
• Bitcoin makes no guarantee that coins will or won't be lost. People can assume that all they want, but coins can be un-lost numerous ways, and should not be prevented. For example, someone may find an old wallet.dat. Another example would be when ECDSA is broken, most lost coins may suddenly be recoverable.

--Luke-jr (talk) 15:11, 5 January 2013 (GMT)

Do you truly believe that there is more than 1% probability that any variant of Proof of Stake or something other than Proof of Work will make its way into Bitcoin? I argue that by definition, Bitcoin's only method of mining is Proof of Work. The chance of there being a large enough consensus of people that would redefine the word Bitcoin to include PoW alternatives is slim at best. Ripper234 (talk) 23:41, 4 May 2013 (GMT)

Yes, at the moment I consider it an inevitable necessity to change to something beyond mere PoW (since PoW alone is only completely secure if 51% of all electricity produced is used on it). And since it requires only the agreement of miners, it's certainly more likely to change than other things which require the consent of every bitcoin holder. The real question is, just what alternative(s) are viable? I am not convinced anyone has discovered that yet. --Luke-jr (talk) 04:54, 5 May 2013 (GMT)

I don't think it's correct that adding alternatives to PoW only requires miner consent, but in any case let's leave the point as "disputed".