Author: Peter Todd 2014-07-27 22:22:52
Published on: 2014-07-27T22:22:52+00:00
In a discussion about whether the blockchain could be used as a reliable time source, Mike Hearn argued that miners have previously gamed the timestamp to produce more gigahashes. However, this is only a few bits and doesn't affect blocks significantly. The possibility of an application being given a fake blockchain and getting stuck in the past forever was also raised, but it was noted that this isn't a problem if the blockchain is used interactively. Instead of relying on the blockchain for determining the current time, one can create a nonce, timestamp it, wait for confirmation, and get the merkle path to the block header. This proves that the attacker has spent whatever resources it took to create a valid block. It's possible to obtain Bitcoin-level trusted time by polling independent servers via HTTPS headers such as google.com, baidu.cn, and yandex.ru, although this becomes a lot stronger when the mining decentralization problem has been solved. The blockchain has the advantage of making it easy to show that invalid blocks are being created for the purpose of creating fake timestamps, and it'd be reasonable for the P2P network to relay any block header seen with difficulty > some anti-DoS threshold.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T01:30:12.142633+00:00