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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



  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 [Bitcoin-development] Addressing rapid changes in mining power 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

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