Author: Justus Ranvier 2015-09-19 02:30:13
Published on: 2015-09-19T02:30:13+00:00
In a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Rune Kjær Svendsen stated that Bitcoin cannot function if the majority of mining power is dishonest. However, Justus Ranvier responded, saying that none of those statements are true. If a majority of Bitcoin miners were to mine invalid blocks, then they would no longer be relevant to the Bitcoin consensus. While there is an issue with light clients not always being able to differentiate between valid and invalid chains, it is possible to create simple proofs that would allow them to do so. These changes would enable any node that knew a chain was invalid to produce a compact proof that anyone else in the network could verify, regardless of how much proof of work was used to create the invalid chain. Committed UTXO sets would need to be safe to rely upon if there existed a similar set of proofs that a particular set was invalid.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:49:00.021306+00:00