Author: Andy Parkins 2011-11-23 12:54:41
Published on: 2011-11-23T12:54:41+00:00
In a forum post, Dr. Andy Parkins proposed a system that would prevent miners from cheating timestamps and increase their probability of mining a block through false timestamps. He argued that in his system, the probability of mining a block is 100%, and the probability of a block being the hardest requires actual hashing power regardless of the timestamp. He also mentioned that time makes no difference with chain difficulty summed correctly, and the hardest chain always wins. To address concerns about the network clock, he referred to util.cpp:GetAdjustedTime(). Dr. Parkins stated that current clients do have an incentive: more time. The more time they get, the more hashes they can try. However, his system required the two-hour window to be reduced and a lower limit to be added. While miners have an incentive to lie about the time, nodes that broadcast to them will reject mistimed blocks, removing the incentive. Furthermore, Dr. Parkins noted that his system prevents an attack possible with current Bitcoin where one recalculates the entire chain. In this scenario, Visa could buy enough computing power to beat the current Bitcoin network significantly and recalculate the entire chain to overtake the real chain and undo previous transactions. He clarified that he was not suggesting that this is likely, and it's mitigated by hard-coded block hashes. Lastly, Dr. Parkins emphasized that blocks are only generatable for the time when the rest of the network is willing to add them to the chain.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:30:22.538954+00:00