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This is a very good primer on a lot of what is going on under the hood to make Bitcoin/etc work. I particularly like how it explores emergent features of the "
by patio11 12y ago
This is a very good primer on a lot of what is going on under the hood to make Bitcoin/etc work. I particularly like how it explores emergent features of the "protocol" that people very rarely understand, like "no block is ever final." (I had been trying to draw an illustration explaining that today and the words "time-ordered probability space with tree-like characteristics" may have been used.)
- im3w1l 12y agoActually there are regular checkpoints. Hashes of some of the blocks are hardcoded into the main bitcoin client. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3114/which-blocks-get-to-be-checkpoints https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3114/which-block...
- patio11 12y agoThat's an optimization to Bitcoin Core's bootstrapping capability, not actually a security feature, except to the very real extent that the current version of Bitcoin Core's code is, warts and all, the only protocol specification that matters.