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One problem is that a black hat could solve a lot of primes in secret, and then use those for a double spend attack. Specifically, a) Spend some coins to buy
by topmonk 8y ago
One problem is that a black hat could solve a lot of primes in secret, and then use those for a double spend attack.
Specifically,
a) Spend some coins to buy some other cryptocurrency
b) use all their secret primes creating a bunch of new blocks on a branch where they haven't spent their money. Since this is the longest branch now, all the other clients accept they haven't really spent it.
c) buy the other cryptocurrency again on this new branch.
- man-and-laptop 8y agoNo. The PoW problem should be derived according to the current state of the blockchain. That makes "solving a lot of primes" in secret inapplicable. You read my post far too literally. The idea is to combine the ideas behind Namecoin with Primecoin.
- bouncycastle 8y agoActually, the problem is that there is no way to control the difficulty. Finding new primes would be harder and harder, but you want the difficulty to adjust up or down to target a block time. Not sure how primecoin approached that problem? Update: found some clues here, https://www.reddit.com/r/primecoin/comments/1i71ma/strange_behaviour_of_difficulty_adjustments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/primecoin/comments/1i71ma/strange_b...