The miners can totally start mining a fork, in fact they can start doing so today, but it doesn't matter because nobody will use their fork and then they will have lost out on their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments into mining equipment.

The node operators play just as critical of a role in Bitcoin as the miners.

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rcxdude 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not the node operators either, it's the people who transact on the chain that determine the value of the coins. The miners can disrupt the ability of the chain to transact to some degree, but they can't make people think their fork is worthwhile (why anyone still thinks BTC has much long-term value is beyond me, but...).

	▲	KetoManx64 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! Thank for that correction.

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mindcandy 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> in fact they can start doing so today

In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.

	▲	windward 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The original died in 2010. It was replaced with a very significant, large fork.
	▲	ab5tract 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right, but a counter point is the etherium fork. Only a handful of people stayed on the “classic” chain after that first DAO turned out to have a massive extraction bug in it.

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shadowgovt 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"I tell ya, everything will be perfect again if everyone would just migrate to BCv6."