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> the cost to get enough shared ledgers to agree that user x has 0$ (previously had $5M) is less than or equal to the amount of money that could be divided amon
by tfha 9y ago
> the cost to get enough shared ledgers to agree that user x has 0$ (previously had $5M) is less than or equal to the amount of money that could be divided amongst the thieves
That's the trick. In some cases, you'd be correct and the thieves can get away with theft. In most cases though you are incorrect, the cost of getting that many ledgers to agree with the thieves is prohibitively high.
This theory underscores the importance of having many full nodes running on the network. If only a small number of people run validating nodes, the cost of committing some theft like this is substantially reduced. This is one of the biggest and most important arguments behind having small blocks instead of large blocks.
Large block supporters tend to think you only need a few full nodes to get immunity from these types of attacks, and small block supporters tend to believe that a small number of nodes is easy to compromise relative to the reward for doing so.
- smokeyj 9y ago> Large block supporters tend to think you only need a few full nodes to get immunity from these types of attacks How exactly do you see an attack on full nodes going down? I imagine the attack would occur on the mining side.. Also, if the mempool becomes more expensive to host than blocks on disk - would you still think small blocks are safer?
- ftlio 9y agoThe mempool is whatever you want it to be. You set the fee by which a transaction rides past your node. And yes, multiple attacks have been attempted by the miner side on full nodes. The most recent being Segwit2X, which didn't get off the ground because convincing 100k nodes that their version of Bitcoin was different wasn't going to work.
- tfha 9y agoHack the full nodes to modify their database. Or cut a business deal with the biggest full nodes (Coinbase, Bitmain, Shapeshift, But go, etc.) and decide to implement a rule much of the network opposes, like raising the block size (which consequentially makes a repeat attack easier in the future because fewer users will have the resources to run full nodes themselves)
- smokeyj 9y ago> and decide to implement a rule much of the network opposes And they'll immediately be blacklisted from the network.. Do people realize you can store the entire bitcoin chain for less than the cost of one transaction? The centralization narrative doesn't hold up.