Author: CANNON 2017-03-25 16:12:54
Published on: 2017-03-25T16:12:54+00:00
In an email thread on 24th March, Aymeric Vitte expressed his concern over the statement "Time is running short I fear" and asked for clarification on when 50% is supposed to be reached. A response from Cannon stated that according to tracking site coin.dance, it is very likely that this will happen within less than four weeks. Although a fork is likely, the worst-case scenario would be bitcoin surviving and the invalid chain becoming an alt. However, Cannon's main concern is the centralized mining power being used to attack the valid chain with the intention of killing it. Cannon went on to discuss a potential 50% attack which he believes should be a concern. He provided a source from Peter Rizun's article which outlined various levels of anti-split protection to entice non-compliant miners to upgrade. If these measures fail, majority miners will deploy hash power as needed to ensure the minority chain includes only empty blocks after the forking point. This can easily be accomplished if the majority miners maintain a secret chain of empty blocks built off their last empty block, publishing only as much of this chain as necessary to orphan any non-empty blocks produced on the minority chain. Cannon also provided his PGP fingerprint and email address, reminding readers that all email correspondence not signed/encrypted with PGP should be considered potentially forged and not private.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:29:46.481178+00:00