Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-04-10 20:29:40
Published on: 2014-04-10T20:29:40+00:00
In an email exchange between Tier Nolan and Pieter Wuille on April 10, 2014, the topic of using hashrate to determine the validity of UTXO sets was discussed. Pieter argued that relying solely on hashrate for this purpose would be problematic because a 51% attack could lead to invalid versions of history being believed. Tier responded by mentioning the concept of fraud proofs, which allow for some "herd immunity" in the system but are not equivalent to zero trust security offered by fully validating nodes.Tier went on to explain that there are still several ways in which attacks could be made, such as through a sybil attack that hides the best chain and fraud proofs while feeding an invalid UTXO set. While there are ideas that can make attacks more difficult, Tier believes that the security provided by a full node is unmatched. He suggests that a zero-knowledge proof of having run the validation code against the claimed chain tip to produce the known UTXO set may be a solution.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:39:28.147106+00:00