There are 3 groups that have influence over Bitcoin:

- miners: they bear the biggest costs and are responsible for the security of the network. Without miners there would be no bitcoin.

- economic nodes: nodes that have real activity going through them that relay transactions and accept or reject blocks that miners provide them. Coinbase's nodes are significantly more valuable than my personal node for my wallet.

- core dev team: their power is soft but integral, no-one wants a chain that can't be updated over time.

Owners of coins currently have little to no influence.

> Without miners there would be no bitcoin.

If all/lots of the miners pulled out, then wouldn't the work factor decrease so that regular people could run it on their desktop machines? That is what happened at the start of bitcoin, right? Are miners that required?

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe there is a catastrophic situation that could leave Bitcoin fully stranded.

Because that difficulty factor changes over many mined blocks, if the ASICs all suddenly stopped mining that chain, there might not be enough hash power to ever find another valid block.

And until so many blocks are found, the difficulty won't change, so the chain will be fully and completely dead (at least on the scale of months)

Can even 1 ASIC card owner mine enough next few blocks?

I seriously doubt it. It might be able to get one at some point, but almost definately not multiple.

For a rough idea of the scales, just look at the current reward for finding a block (12 btc) and it's current value (about $31k USD). Miners are just barely breaking even on ASICs, so a $31k miner should be able to pay for itself over it's lifetime.

So unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of miners, you aren't going to realistically find a block, and unless you have millions of dollars of ASICs you aren't going to be able to mine enough to keep a chain from dying on your own.

So I presume that a hard fork would become economically very viable at that point.

But then you've just created a new coin that shares a bit of history with another one.

Yes, and unless you're in the mood of arguing over Theseus's ship paradox, with hundreds of thousands of stakeholders. Essentially this currency would become what Bitcoin is today.

> Are miners that required?

Yes, we need miners. But yes, you're right, the difficulty is adjustable, so ultimately either we need miners[0] or we need miners[i].

If there's any value to be had for a coin and the PoW matches existing hardware, it's likely that miners will show up.

> wouldn't the work factor decrease so that regular people could run it on their desktop machines?

other people would start mining-- botnets, gpu gaming enthusiasts, people with excess FPGA capacity, etc. and then these people would become miners.

The issue is that what keeps bitcoin together is that the computation is used as a proof which transaction is accurate. Smaller number of miners would mean that a party with a very powerful hardware could then decide what's real or not. If someone can get over 50% computation power of bitcoins, that entity would decide what transaction is real or not.

Some alternative crypto currencies use algorithms that supposed to be really hard to do in ASCIC, I suppose those would be more feasible for rel people to use them, but as I understand we are stuck this way with bitcoin.

Without miners wouldn't the problem just be no more new bitcoins, so while the total would never grow we could still trade them?

No not at all. Miners are the ones generating blocks and validating them though the giant distributed work they each do. Without miners there would be no new blocks which means no verified transactions. The only place trades could still happen is on exchanges because they all happen off block and don't rely on the blockchain to track who owns what but it'd be impossible to move more coins onto or out of an exchange so you'd be stuck.

what happens when all possible bitcoins are mined then?

Miners will be paid with transaction fees. Already if you don't include a fee in your transaction you can expect much longer transaction confirmation times or to never receive confirmation because miners already try to pack the most fees into each single block to maximize their payout.

Miners' main function is to secure the blockchain, not to create new coins. The term is a bit of a misnomer. Without miners no transactions could be made, so Bitcoin would become worthless. More rudimentarly miners simply inject expense into the chain, making it too costly to hack. Another (imperfect) way of thinking about it, is that miners pre-hack the chain by doing all the brute force that a hacker otherwise would, making it unhackable.

No, you need miners to transfer bitcoins

This concept is similar to Proof of Stake which was pioneered by Peercoin. [1]

It's been around a long time and bitcoin hasn't been changed to take advantage of it.

Ultimately, the community seems to have a big say in bitcoin and it's not limited to a proportional share. The community includes at least {holders, merchants, miners}. It's in their mutual interest to preserve stability but if one group acts in their exclusive interest to the detriment of the others, it makes sense for the others to consider a fork.

> I was wondering, why the bitcoin owners themself cant't decide. ... should have more to say about it.

Ultimately that sounds a little aristocratic and bitcoin itself seems more egalitarian. Regardless of philosophy, the blockchain is defined to be a consensus of a set of computers running software. Anyone of us could write new software to take the bitcoin blockchain into a new direction with new features. If we could convince some folks to run our new software, we would have our own fork. If the features are compelling enough, we could take the majority of nodes with us. Decentralized and fairly democratic -- you can have your blockchain and we can have ours.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

> It's been around a long time and bitcoin hasn't been changed to take advantage of it.

Of course it hasn't, Bitcoin is decentralized and Peercoin requires the developer of the system to continually sign the chain.

Proof of stake sounds lovely, but it doesn't work and attempts to rescue it have at best resulted in things with very different security assumptions and properties from Bitcoin. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Once there are hardforks, people will be able to 'vote with their wallets', and a consensus will be apparent through exchance rates. Ethereum on the other hand wants to introduce the rather nebulous concept of 'proof of stake', under which something like you say might be feasable.

That's not how bitcoin works right now. To change the network to function like that would almost certainly require a hard fork. That's probably enough to go on if you're genuinely interested in this.