Its time for a hard bitcoin forkhacking distributed
In this post, I discuss why generic compressors will not work well with Bitcoin, make the case for a custom compressor, and suggest that we run a community challenge to develop the best compressor. A modest suggestion on how to proceed with the block size debate, wherein we suggest explicitly defining the criteria for evaluating block size increase proposals.
We review some of the feedback we received on Bitcoin-NG and discuss why every new permission-less ledger would be better off with NG compared to the alternatives.
We introduce a new technique for increasing the throughput and reducing the latency, at the same time, of blockchain-based protocols. The recent Bitcoin blocksize debate demonstrates the need for a robust governance structure. There is a new craze in the Bitcoin world, and it's not good for Bitcoin.
In a new analysis of Bitcoin mining, Ittay Eyal shows that the equilibrium between miners is unstable, and identifies a stable equilibrium that might, as a side effect, reduce the size of open, public mining pools.
State of computer security remains dismal, as evidenced by the lengths Bitcoin users must go through to secure their digital assets. We outline a small change to the Bitcoin mining protocol that rules out big, public mining pools. It preserves the current investment in Bitcoin by both existing users and by existing miners. There seems to be a lot of confusion over the kinds of attacks that a Bitcoin mining monopoly can engage in. We clarify the space of attacks available to a Bitcoin mining monopoly.
Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. This note describes what we should do about it. Recent leaks of Mt. Gox trading history has caused people to claim that massive market manipulation was taking place.
I argue that there is no evidence for this. The real story of how weak NoSQL systems allowed users to make money out of the thin air and brought down two Bitcoin exchanges, one permanently.
There are lots of theories about what may have happened at Mt. This post examines what may not have happened, and how to avoid that which did happen.
How to detect when someone in the network is engaged in selfish mining. BTC Guild released a number of blocks in quick succession, making some people worry that they are selfish mining. We discuss the evidence. Bitcoin was having problems with LevelDB. We identified and fixed the bug. In this article, we'll talk a little about LevelDB, Bitcoin, and our fix. New measurements show that successful selfish mining attacks are quite feasible.
Bitcoin's unique features allow it to be used to for social causes. A cash boycott is one such way to affect social change. I worry that we might have to face broken, flaky and untrustworthy systems for decades to come.
There are companies which spend millions of dollars on PR, bankroll conferences and hire salesmen to go from door to door in the valley to spread misinformation, marketing people to pretend to be developers on social media to peddle broken software, and people who hire paid trolls to attack anyone who says anything that interferes with their market position.
I have nothing that can compare -- certainly no PR engine or paid stooges whose paycheck depends on perpetuating myths and foggy thinking. What I do have is a grasp of distributed systems science albeit partial, as no one can claim complete mastery over such a large area , and a willingness to write for a general audience.
So, I generally stick to a principled, scientific take, and try to point out issues that others may have missed. You will not see me regurgitating bogus reasoning about why the CAP Theorem means you should throw all consistent databases out the window -- literally everyone in the valley already does that, and incidentally, they're all wrong.
I will also typically veer away from ideology, so you will not see me claim that cryptocurrencies will bring an end to fiat, governments and war -- they won't, and besides, others serve that kool-aid far better than I can. Since I typically have time to chime in only when I see wholesale groups making mistakes, this lends a slightly contrarian tone to the blog. This is purely a side effect of not having enough time to blog -- I lack the time to build rapport by regurgitating group think, so I will rely on the positivity of my readers to never forget that I pick the topics to write on because they are inherently exciting, and I'm here solely to improve the state-of-the-art.
Those of you who have met me in person know that I'm supremely positive and optimistic in real life. My values are centered around a progressive technologist's perspective.
I believe in improving people's lives and maximizing societal good. Some provide enlightenment, others provide intrigue, and some are there to get my pulse up in the mornings. About me My professional page. IC3, where I am a Co-Director. About The Blog This is a blog for everyday techies building real systems people use, and their still-with-it-and-technical CTOs.
About Me I build things. Cryptocurrencies I have worked hard to improve the state of the art in blockchain tech, as well as the overall cryptocurrency community: I am currently working to build a new coin on top of Avalanche that has revolutionary features.
I co-founded bloXroute , whose mission is to enable blockchains to scale by addressing the often ignored network layer. My group was the first to propose the use of secure hardware for facilitating Layer-2 transfers. My group was the first to do a comparative study of decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum. My group developed the Miniature World testbed for running large-scale protocol emulations. The network abandons the blocks that are not in the longest chain they are called orphaned blocks.
Intentional forks that modify the rules of a blockchain can be classified as follows: A hard fork is a rule change such that the software validating according to the old rules will see the blocks produced according to the new rules as invalid. In case of a hard fork, all nodes meant to work in accordance with the new rules need to upgrade their software.
If one group of nodes continues to use the old software while the other nodes use the new software, a split can occur. For example, Ethereum has hard-forked to "make whole" the investors in The DAO , which had been hacked by exploiting a vulnerability in its code.
In the Nxt community was asked to consider a hard fork that would have led to a rollback of the blockchain records to mitigate the effects of a theft of 50 million NXT from a major cryptocurrency exchange. The hard fork proposal was rejected, and some of the funds were recovered after negotiations and ransom payment. Alternatively, to prevent a permanent split, a majority of nodes using the new software may return to the old rules, as was the case of bitcoin split on 12 March In contrast to a hard fork, a soft fork is a change of rules that creates blocks recognized as valid by the old software, i.
A user activated soft fork UASF is a contentious concept of enforcing a soft fork rule change without the majority support of miners. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. In cryptocurrencies , a fork is defined variously as "what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths forward" [1] "a change in protocol" [2] or a situation that "occurs when two or more blocks have the same block height" [3] [a] Forks are related to the fact that different parties need to use common rules to maintain the history of the blockchain.