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Theoretically, if somebody forked the Ethereum PoS blockchain and faked timestamps to catch up to the real chain’s height, would there be any way to know which
by camjohnson26 4y ago
Theoretically, if somebody forked the Ethereum PoS blockchain and faked timestamps to catch up to the real chain’s height, would there be any way to know which was the original other than community agreement? Seems like PoW makes it impossible since duplicating the original chain is prohibitively expensive.
Not challenging the solution, just genuinely curious in how PoS works.
- 0xfoobar 4y agoGreat question, it's not timestamps but attestations (signed validator votes for pairs of checkpoint blocks) that determines the canonical chain head. This fork choice rule, known as LMD-GHOST, is different from PoW which has a "greatest difficulty" rule for determining the canonical chain. There is some element of bootstrapping who the original validator set was, known as "weak subjectivity". There's a great post from Vitalik exploring this further at https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
- camjohnson26 4y agoAwesome, thanks!