From: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail•com>
To: Christian Decker <decker.christian@gmail•com>
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Addressing rapid changes in mining power
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:09:10 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABsx9T0VH5i0HrEjxfxxtzO2MtmN7UEyAUXoq9puc-1nKw3G4Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CALxbBHW2KGv=sEvYqpGGsy8jjJ3+yE02BegwPhjGapuT9z7v_Q@mail.gmail.com>
On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Christian Decker
<decker.christian@gmail•com> wrote:
> At some point you might find an incredibly hard block that makes your forked
> chain the hardest one in the network
Seems to me that's the real problem with any "hardest block found in X
minutes" scheme.
If I get lucky and find a really extremely hard block then I have an
incentive to keep it secret and build a couple more blocks on top of
it, then announce them all at the same time.
If the rest of the network rejects my longer chain because I didn't
announce the extremely hard block in a timely fashion... then how
could the network ever recover from a real network split? A network
split/rejoin will look exactly the same.
Bitcoin as-is doesn't have the "I got lucky and found an extremely
hard block" problem because the difficulty TARGET is used to compute
chain difficulty, not the actual hashes found.
---
PS: I proposed a different method for dealing with large hash power
drops for the testnet on the Forums yesterday, and am testing it
today.
--
--
Gavin Andresen
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-11-23 15:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-11-23 10:35 Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 11:25 ` Jorge Timón
2011-11-23 11:30 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 11:51 ` Jorge Timón
2011-11-23 12:10 ` Christian Decker
2011-11-23 13:13 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 14:38 ` Christian Decker
2011-11-23 15:09 ` Gavin Andresen [this message]
2011-11-23 15:35 ` Alan Reiner
2011-11-23 15:39 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 16:26 ` Joel Joonatan Kaartinen
2011-11-23 15:11 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 12:54 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 15:10 ` Jorge Timón
2011-11-23 15:29 ` Andy Parkins
2011-11-23 15:38 ` Jorge Timón
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=CABsx9T0VH5i0HrEjxfxxtzO2MtmN7UEyAUXoq9puc-1nKw3G4Q@mail.gmail.com \
--to=gavinandresen@gmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoin-development@lists$(echo .)sourceforge.net \
--cc=decker.christian@gmail$(echo .)com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox