Author: Jonathan Levin 2014-05-24 23:57:39
Published on: 2014-05-24T23:57:39+00:00
Bitcoin's ability to establish the primacy of blocks by time through incentives arising from block propagation times has been underestimated. Partitions on the network evolve as a block is propagated, with blocks reaching over 50% of the network in five seconds. This means that 50% of the hashing power are already building a block that builds on top of the block that is already circulating, resulting in a fast decline in the probability of a collision on the network and an increase in the probability that the miner who propagated the first block wins given a collision occurs. However, miners who are less well connected to the network may find block propagation times a bigger issue, as they spend more time mining redundant problems and may find blocks to compete with blocks that are already spreading throughout the network. Jonathan Levin has written a paper that models this more formally and has some numerical simulations but cannot publish it on the internet at present due to university regulations.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T23:25:01.990382+00:00