Bitcoin Myth #1: "Miners control Bitcoin"
Channel: David Veksler
Date: 2021-12-25

Bitcoin Myth #1: "Miners control Bitcoin"  

Miners do not control Bitcoin.  Every full node has a vote by choosing which chain has economic value.  


If miners went against consensus, the network would reject their blocks and get new miners.  

If miners controlled Bitcoin, they would be motivated to make changes like changing the block subsidy or keeping fees high.  

If Bitcoin was designed to give miners all the power, the network would be radically different: since only there are only a few large entities doing most of the mining, a permissioned network with only a few nodes would have 1000x the performance.  But this would cost censorship resistance.

Miners are only one part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.  They cannot unilaterally hard fork Bitcoin without consensus. Even if a majority of miners made a hard fork of Bitcoin, the rest of the network would simply ignore their blocks by refusing to buy them.  What matters is which chain captures the most economic value.  Miners who vote for the lower-value chain face a strong disincentive in the form of a lower sale price for their blocks. 

Everyone who runs and transacts on a full node has a vote on the future of Bitcoin because they decide which chain captures the economic value of the network.