Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Network partition recovery

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2024 01:30:12 +0000

On Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 02:31:42PM -0700, Tao Effect 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?

Given how little bandwidth it takes to synchronize blocks, and the enormous
financial incentives to solve this problem, it's unlikely that an internet
split would result in a long term network partition. It's just too easy to fix
the split through technologies like satellite internet, amateur radio,
Blockstream satellite, pigeons, etc. If the event leading to the split manages
to defeat all these mechanisms on a large scale, there's a good chance that
Bitcoin is the least of our worries...

Anyway, transactions in blocks that have been reorged out can be mined in
subsequent blocks so long as there are no conflicts. In practice, this will
happen automatically.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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