Roger_Murdock said: On the other hand, it does seem like there should be some way to use markets to figure out whether a proposed feature adds value. So maybe you've got a prediction market that says that there's a 50% chance (to make the math simple) that a particular feature will have been successfully forked into the main chain by the end of 2016. Now imagine that there's a conditional call option to buy Bitcoin at $400 on December 31, 2016 that's only executable if the fork has been implemented, and another conditional call option to buy Bitcoin at $400 on that date if the fork has not been implemented. If the first option trades for more than the second, doesn't that provide evidence that the market thinks the fork would be value-adding? Click to expand...

It's true that fork arbitrage doesn't add much if there are only two options and we're sure one side has the hashrate majority (and that the hashrate is basically in line with the market - if not, a change in hashing algo is possible as a nuclear option by the underpowered side of the fork). In practice, though, it'll be hard to know for sure unless we have a supermajority committed, due to the messiness of mining pools being proxies and such (plus this messiness of the dynamics around 75%, reputational damage from changing if it couldn't be achieved, unluckiness in mining the blocks during the period, etc.). Also, as a larger point, a futures market could actually be used to set the blocksize cap exactly, rather than pick it from a small set of options. Paul Sztorc I think describes how prediction markets can do this.Now if we're only trying avoid a permanent split at 50/50, I agree that won't happen because of the tipping dynamics you and @Peter R mentioned, and that something like an 80/20 split would only happen if the market valued the separation (say, because having SettlementCoin and PaymentCoin really turns out to be ideal) more highly than the loss of network effect from the split (and the loss from having to change the mining algo on the minority branch to keep the ship from getting sunk).I'd say then that overall the forkbitrage process is a lot more comfortable to me as it covers all the contingencies, but in this particular case it looks like Classic may have enough of a lock that it won't be necessary. Part of my excitement about seeing it gain traction is for its use in general, rather than specifically for Classic vs. Core.Yeah something like this sounds good to me. Such markets will spring up as soon as there is demand for them, and maybe that is almost now.[doublepost=1453179715,1453178991][/doublepost]Also, just in case it wasn't clear, the tipping dynamics of the sinking ship or ball rolling down a hill also apply to the forkbitrage situation. I imagine it would be over within a few minutes since exchanges are set up to display reliable real-time information about what everyone else is doing with their "votes." That's why I think forkbitrage wouldn't be any, and could be a lot better in any extenuating circumstances. For the future, in a world where mining is a highly specialized industry, it also gives a much more accessible means of giving a voice to the broader ecosystem of all stakeholders.One more edit: This is one of those "all roads lead to Rome" things. The market is always in control, and its control is expressed all over the place, so it can generally be expressed through miners alone, and it will probably be remarkable how true that proves to be, but I contend that the purest expression is through forkbitrage - whether that purity will be necessary is another question. It may surprise us how beautifully permeated the market control is into all the things in Bitcoin, such that the forkbitrage idea can remain theoretical for a lot longer than I would have thought.