Author: David A. Harding 2019-12-16 09:10:18
Published on: 2019-12-16T09:10:18+00:00
In an email exchange, Antoine Riard expressed concern that if executed properly, attacks could stay stealth until it's too late to react. Dave responded that the attacks described are pretty easy to detect by simply comparing the time of the latest block header to real-time, and emergency action should be taken if the difference is too large. He further explained how this strategy applies to normal and pathological cases. Dave suggested that a possibly optimal attack strategy would be to combine commitment/penalty transaction censorship with plausible block delays, which can maximize an attacker's chance of stealing funds without triggering an alarm. He also discussed an interesting case where a miner or cartel of miners could deliberately trigger a false positive of block delay protection. However, Dave did not believe the proposed fix for the time warp problem would address this issue entirely. Finally, he provided a calculation showing that if Bitcoin suddenly loses half of its hashrate so that the average time between blocks is 20 minutes, there's a once-in-a-century chance of a block taking more than 310 minutes to produce.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T22:09:33.129494+00:00