Tweetstorm: Why People Think Bitcoin Miners Are Not Intermediaries

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Tweetstorm: Bitcoin Miners Are Not Intermediaries

By Angela Walch

Posted July 18, 2019

These are reasons why people think #Bitcoin miners (including any of hashers, mining pool operators, cloud mining companies) are not intermediaries, from what I can tell. #crypto

What am I missing, and what do you think?

(1) miners don’t know who the sender or recipient of a transaction is, so they can’t discriminate amongst them other than based on the txn fee offered.

(2) the economic incentives built into the system deter miners from trying to cheat.

(3) a given miner only gets to censor or order txns in a block they actually win, so a particular miner only has power for a very short time.

(4) it is unknown which miner will actually win a particular block (hashpower only determines the odds of winning), so there is no particular, designated miner at the time a user proposes a transaction.

(5) miners perform purely ministerial tasks involving no discretion or judgement (just run code), so they are purely automata.

(6) there is not a single central miner that processes all txns (only have AN intermediary when there is ONLY one).

(7) related to the game theory, there an assumption that a majority of the miners/hashpower will follow the rules of the protocol and not attempt to exploit the system or its users.

(8) anyone can become a miner - there is no permission needed to begin or to stop.

(9) a miner can’t include an invalid txn as full nodes won’t approve.

(10) Please note that in compiling this list, I am not endorsing any of these stmts as true, nor am I putting forth any legal consequences that should/shouldn’t follow.

And I am using the most basic, lay defn of ‘intermediary’.

A middleman.

**To be clear, I think most of these claims are actually not strictly accurate.