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This is a very good and clear explanation of how bitcoin type blockchains work. It could easily have been made simpler and more general at the same time by omit
by p4bl0 8y ago
This is a very good and clear explanation of how bitcoin type blockchains work. It could easily have been made simpler and more general at the same time by omitting the proof of work aspect, which is not even discussed actually. The "begin with four zeros" rule is completely arbitrary, it could be any prefix of any length depending on the necessary amount of work that you want, including zero. And with an empty prefix we still have a blockchain with all the properties presented here that hold.
- abraham_lincoln 8y agoIs it necessary to be based on the prefix, or can it be implemented by pattern, for instance, every even byte is zero, or the 4 bytes after the first 3 bytes must be all 7s, etc? Is it simply brute-forcing hashes, looking for matching patterns that are not yet known?
- dlubarov 8y agoIn practice Bitcoin treats SHA-256 outputs as integers, and requires them to be under a certain limit, based on the current difficulty. That way we can make small adjustments to the difficulty. If we actually used a rule like "this many zeros in hex", the difficulty bumps would have to be rather large.
- lmpostor 8y agoI don't see what prevents you from adding complexity. And yeah, but it also requires valid transactions if you want to collect fees, as well as the knowledge of the valid previous block.