Author: Troy Benjegerdes 2014-07-28 17:33:30
Published on: 2014-07-28T17:33:30+00:00
In a discussion on Bitcoin’s blockchain technology, Mike Hearn argues that miners have in the past gamed the timestamp to use it as an extra nonce and squeeze some more gigahashes out of their hardware/pool. He also notes that currently, the chain could be dominated by a coalition of just two pools. However, a solution presented is to use at least three block chains to obtain reliable time sources and ensure they all agree within an hour. One issue highlighted is that apps cannot tell if they were given a truncated chain, which can keep such an app stuck in the past forever. The blockchain provides an approximate time source that gives a world-wide consensus without direct trust of any player and has a strong cryptographically sound time source if multiple diverse sources are used. Meanwhile, for now, you can get Bitcoin-level trusted time by polling at least two or three independent servers.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T01:30:47.091538+00:00