Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Network partition recovery

From: Ethan Heilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2024 16:30:07 -0400

> Have Bitcoiners gamed this out?

Not that I am aware of.

Short term partitions (10 to 30 minutes) would likely not be noticed by
most users. Long term partitions (1 day to 1 week) would likely cause
relying parties to find non-internet mechanisms to communicate blocks and
transactions.

If say 20% of the mining power was stuck in a partition, the miners in that
partition would likely stop mining once they realized they were partitioned
because they would understand they would lose all their rewards when the
partition stops. Likely people in the partition would no longer respect
confirmations made by miners in the partition because those confirmations
will be reversed when the partition ends.

It seems likely that parties (miners, relying parties) in the partition
will attempt to communicate outside the partition to interact with Bitcoin.

The issue becomes much trickier if the partition, partitions mining power
exactly into 50%. It is unlikely that if the internet has a long term
partition it will exactly split the mining power.

> What happens when the Internet reconnects?

"Longest" chain wins.

 > Or is a merge possible? Can it be done automatically?

Some DAG chains do allow to two forks to be merged automatically including
resolving double spends. Adding this functionality in Bitcoin would likely
be the biggest consensus change in the history of Bitcoin.

On Sat, Jun 15, 2024, 6:11 PM Tao Effect <[email-masked]> wrote:

> What work has been done on recovering from a network partition?
>
> The day is fast approaching when Bitcoin could be split in two not by a
> purposeful fork, but because the Internet is split in two.
>
> Have Bitcoiners gamed this out? What happens when the Internet reconnects?
> Do we throw out half of the transactions? Or is a merge possible? Can it be
> done automatically?
>
> - Greg
>
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