Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-04-27 17:05:45
Published on: 2014-04-27T17:05:45+00:00
In a discussion about the validity of blockchain chains, Sergio Lerner argues that economic arguments based on the opportunity cost of mining invalid blocks are necessary to trust the most-work chain as valid, without invoking moon math or interactive protocols requiring honest peers over jamming-free networks. However, Peter Todd counters that making any assumptions about honest peers is still necessary for computing economic arguments correctly. Additionally, he points out that an alternative solution involves using Fiat-Shamir transforms to achieve probabilistic proofs, but this massively increases proof size and verification time. Furthermore, he notes that the method using non-proving peers (NPPs) to find a common ancestor in a chain scan is actually O(1), since it only skips a potential short fork. However, this assumes that all peers are synchronized and that there are no attacker nodes creating a fake history of difficulty-1 blocks. Todd suggests that back-link block-history commitments with an interactive protocol would allow a binary search to find common ancestors and trust the intermediate links actually exist, without relying on honest peers.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T21:47:23.642179+00:00