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I'm a little rusty with the terminology, but in a blockchain, the canonical current block is the one that has the greatest amount of proof of work (I think they
by acjohnson55 1y ago
I'm a little rusty with the terminology, but in a blockchain, the canonical current block is the one that has the greatest amount of proof of work (I think they call this the heaviest chain). Typically, each new block is the descendant of the most recent block. But it is possible to create a heavier chain from an earlier block. This invalidates any transactions on what was previously known to be the heaviest chain, and is called a reorg.
The farther back, the less likely a reorg is, so to have a reorg that invalidates is blocks is extremely unusual.
If one entity has a majority of the hash power, they gain the ability to try to force reorgs with a likelihood that increases with their advantage in hash power.
I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer.
- jmholla 1y agoThis was a great answer. I'm glad you spent the time on it. Though I am curious what the 6 indicates.
- ningen_000 1y agoSix blocks
- tromp 1y agoUser skarz did indeed ask an LLM, which got [flagged] since the LLM gave a distinctly worse answer. Expand the [9 more] below to see it.
- creatonez 1y ago> I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer. Please don't. This would be useless spam, and is completely rude. Do we tell people to "Just google it?" here?
- acjohnson55 1y agoIt's different in that there's no need to go hunting through search results. This is what Claude responded when I just asked it: https://claude.ai/share/684fa294-ee35-4044-8344-99e1ceb2e643 https://claude.ai/share/684fa294-ee35-4044-8344-99e1ceb2e643 I don't think that's spam at all, and I don't think I did anything special in my prompt that someone with less background knowledge could have done.