You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork. I still maintain it is up to the majority of nodes/users to determine if it is valid. If there has been a hard fork then by definition the network has rejected an invalid block(s). It is up to nodes/users to determine which network is "the" coin and thus mining valid blocks.
> You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork. I still maintain it is up to the majority of nodes/users to determine if it is valid. If there has been a hard fork then by definition the network has rejected an invalid block(s). It is up to nodes/users to determine which network is "the" coin and thus mining valid blocks.
Nope, I was very clear that in this context there is more than one network, so expressions like your "by definition the network has rejected invalid blocks" doesn't make sense. Network A rejects blocks by network B, and network B rejects blocks by network A. There is more than one network. You don't need to look further than Ethereum Classic to see that this can happen in practice. The "minority chain" doesn't just disappear magically.
I think we are losing track of the original claim which was miners could steal $100M from a user. Let's say I create a fork (network B) in which a user's account is set to 0 and mine has the amount that the user once had. In no sense have I stolen $100M from the user if it's on a chain that people don't recognize as being the one that represents the user's money (network A).
The original implication was you don't want to piss miners off otherwise they can unilaterally decide to take your money away. That is false.
> The original implication was you don't want to piss miners off otherwise they can unilaterally decide to take your money away. That is false.
If you are retreating your argument to that goal post, then we are in agreement: pissing off miners will not result in miners stealing your money. Your original argument was stronger, however. You were asserting that a minority-supported fork would not be able to steal money, which is not true.
I'm not retreating anything, that is still my assertion. The miners alone cannot delete your money. That was the original claim[1]. My responses[2] from the beginning have been addressing that.
It is a common misconception that miners, because they are the ones who produce new blocks, have power over the network and set the rules. That is not the case. Miners determine the order and inclusion of __valid__ transactions. Deleting your money would require a fork. Even if a majority of miners mined their own fork but didn't get users/nodes on board they would be wasting their time on what is essentially an altcoin that they alone care about. The network would ignore them and your $100M has not been deleted because it still exists on the chain everyone actually cares about.
There are only so many different ways I can state the above idea (going-on 4 times in this thread alone). If you still disagree, then I'm sorry I wasn't able to explain it any better. I'm going to politely decline from responding any further to this thread because I think we are just wasting each others' time.
[1]
"I guess you'd better hope you're never on the wrong side, politically, from a majority of ETH miners."
You're talking about minority-supported forks as if it was some kind of hypothetical scenario, where these forks couldn't possibly have any value. But it's not a hypothetical scenario, it's a scenario which has occurred multiple times in practice. So we don't have to discuss in hypotheticals about whether those minority-supported forks would have any value or not; we can look at what actually happened in those instances. For example, Bitcoin Cash right now has $9B market cap (not $0, like you imply).
The original claim was simply that the miners could delete $100M, not that a single person could unilaterally steal it.
I think it's not impossible to imagine miners and nodes voting to hard-fork a coin because some genocidal villain, Mr LiterallyHitler, had a large amount of wealth wrapped up in it.
