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The design of bitcoin is that this is resolved by one network's coins quickly becoming worthless. The only chain that matters is the one that most people believ
by mabbo 9y ago
The design of bitcoin is that this is resolved by one network's coins quickly becoming worthless. The only chain that matters is the one that most people believe is the right chain. The right chain is the one with the most committed blocks on it.
In the event of a partition, the partition with the most miners will almost certainly have the longest chain of committed blocks and be considered the right one.
*Note: I'm a hobbyist, not an expert on this. Please correct me if I'm wrong!
- KirinDave 9y agoThis is a common rebuttal but it seems to only make sense in a human timescale with assumptions of a lack of partitioning. The miners are very fast, but have the same network as the rest of us for the most part. Disrupting that network renders the current system quite vulnerable to partitioning and if you can carefully partition the miners such that they're arguing among themselves, bitcoin effectively grinds to a halt and requires human intervention and negotiation to fix. This is a statement not intended to be damning criticism btw. The proper failure mode for a distributed ledger IS to fail as a quorum takes place. Ultimately, bitcoin exists so long as it is more profitable for it to exist than for it to be destroyed. This is the case for most distributed systems.