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Hi, I hope my tone wasn't too grating. I stand by my point though, for the purpose of totally ordering blocks, the difficulty is not intergalactic because a so

by rocqua 9y ago

Hi, I hope my tone wasn't too grating. I stand by my point though, for the purpose of totally ordering blocks, the difficulty is not intergalactic because a solution on mars is much less useful than a solution on earth. The problem here is time-delay preventing simultaneity. This is the same problem that block chain time-stamping hopes to solve. Thus it seems unfair to me to ignore this problem. I wonder how tight the 10 minute mark is at the moment. I imagine there might be nodes that are 5 seconds apart on the network. Maybe even more when we have backhoe outages. How much lower could the 10 minutes be before we start seeing to many orphans even on earth?

aey 9y ago
I am working on a project that’s cryptographically encoding passage of time as data, with a millisecond resolution. https://github.com/solana-labs/solana https://github.com/solana-labs/solana As long as the fabrication process is the same you can have high confidence at time and order of events that are far apart.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
> the difficulty is not intergalactic because a solution on mars is much less useful than a solution on earth We're talking apples and oranges, I don't think there is a disagreement - I was only saying that the statistical problem is "intergalactic", not that how it's used in Bitcoin is useful across galaxies. The fact that the probability of the outcome is same across the whole universe is what I found particularly remarkable.
ema 9y ago
If there is no double spend between the later arriving block from mars and the block earth already mined the next block could acknowledge both. Basically making the blockchain a blocklatice. If I haven't missed anything the only reason it wasn't done like this from the beginning is that when the orphan rate is low it' not worth the additional code complexity.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Interesting! A block lattice seems like a nice thing. It would be problematic with regards to money creation though. As we get more blocks per 10 minutes, we get more block-rewards (new bitcoin) per minute. It also seems weird to 'amend' history by saying some other stuff also happened. Thinking of this, could you maybe use this to somehow block a payment by adding a 'past block' that already spends the bitcoins in your payment?

by rocqua 9y ago

aey 9y ago

I am working on a project that’s cryptographically encoding passage of time as data, with a millisecond resolution. https://github.com/solana-labs/solana https://github.com/solana-labs/solana As long as the fabrication process is the same you can have high confidence at time and order of events that are far apart.

gtrubetskoy 9y ago

> the difficulty is not intergalactic because a solution on mars is much less useful than a solution on earth We're talking apples and oranges, I don't think there is a disagreement - I was only saying that the statistical problem is "intergalactic", not that how it's used in Bitcoin is useful across galaxies. The fact that the probability of the outcome is same across the whole universe is what I found particularly remarkable.

ema 9y ago

If there is no double spend between the later arriving block from mars and the block earth already mined the next block could acknowledge both. Basically making the blockchain a blocklatice. If I haven't missed anything the only reason it wasn't done like this from the beginning is that when the orphan rate is low it' not worth the additional code complexity.

rocqua 9y ago
Interesting! A block lattice seems like a nice thing. It would be problematic with regards to money creation though. As we get more blocks per 10 minutes, we get more block-rewards (new bitcoin) per minute. It also seems weird to 'amend' history by saying some other stuff also happened. Thinking of this, could you maybe use this to somehow block a payment by adding a 'past block' that already spends the bitcoins in your payment?