Is the bitcoin blockchain really non-corruptible?

Is the bitcoin blockchain really non-corruptible?

Some people say that proof of work is better than proof of stake, because it's not possible to rewrite the whole blockchain on-spot. One would need to "re-mine" everything.

But I think this is not true! A hypothetical attacker can rewrite the whole bitcoin blockchain and make the timestamps make the block-time exactly 10 minutes, and this way the difficulty of mining will remain at minimum, and no real mining is required. The mining effort is minimal.

The way I understand it, is that such a problem is practically solved by check-pointing the blockchain in the source code. The devs hard-code block-hashes in the source code so that no one could do that. Is my description of the situation correct?

In other words: Without check-pointing, the bitcoin blockchain is inherently corruptible and can be destroyed. What am I missing here?

PS: This is not about PoW vs PoS. This is basically about the claim that PoW is non-corruptible. If my conclusions are true, we can just do the same with PoS blockchains and use check-pointing to prevent corruptibility.

https://ift.tt/2KIgPLM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

bitcoin node: what is the difference between simnet and regtest?

bitcoin node: what is the difference between simnet and regtest? btcd, and presumably other bitcoin node implementations, seem to have 4 network options: mainnet testnet regtest simnet. I get that mainnet and testnet both are "public" in that your node will communicate with other nodes and that both have an existing blockchain and genesis block. However, from what I can tell, both simenet and regtest both create a local only blockchain, and both will create a new genesis block. I this case, what is the difference, and which is better (easier) for developing bitcoin applications? This is what the documentation has to say: --regtest Use the regression test network --simnet Use the simulation test network https://ift.tt/2TAMkwe
Read more

How to check if Electrum is masking my IP with the Tor proxy?

How to check if Electrum is masking my IP with the Tor proxy? When i start Electrum from the command line i see this mensage: (python3:7069): dbind-WARNING **: 14:09:58.452: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken What does it mean? I just installed Electrum following this tutorial: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/tor.html I followed the instructions from this topic " Option 2: Multiple servers but Tor Main ". I installed Electrum using the command line on Ubuntu, check the " Installation from Python sources " on this link https://electrum.org/#download if you want to see the codes. And i used this code bellow to download the Signatue keys: $ gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 2BD5824B7F9470E6 I checked the both checkbox: 1)...
Read more

How generic miner connects to bitcoin or ethereum network and does it needs to store entire blockchain?

How generic miner connects to bitcoin or ethereum network and does it needs to store entire blockchain? Suppose I want to design generic crypto currency miner starting from scratch . By generic I mean it can be configured to support a large number of available crypto currencies. How this miner knows to mine coins for bitcoin as opposed to ethereum coin (ETH), for example ? For ethereum it will connect to etherium P2P network and what is the network address OR there are some kind of API exposed by ethereum network which it invokes? Assume this generic miner directly connects to crypto currency network for the purpose of mining coins without mining pools. Does it needs to store entire blockchain of the crypto currency in local disk storage? The answers to above questions do not depend on wether the miner is configured to use CPU or GPU or both? http://ift.tt/2Dv1cYY
Read more