But the protocol must have a deterministic way to determine if a block must be accepted or rejected. I don't know what NTP is, but if you can have a perfect distributed clock your proposal may work.
2011/11/23, Andy Parkins <andypark...@gmail.com>: > On 2011 November 23 Wednesday, Jorge Timón wrote: > >> Well, I meant "the probability of your block being the hardest". >> What a miner can do is hash the block (cheating the timestamp) for 2 >> more minutes than the rest of the people and then send it to the other >> nodes. Nodes cannot possibly know when did you hashed the block only >> by looking at their clock when they receive it, because there's also >> network latency. > > True enough; but then the same is true for everyone else. If the window is > 2 > minutes after the stated time, then everyone _can_ wait until the end of > that > window. However, they risk their block being rejected by their peers, and > their efforts are wasted. In fact, it can be guaranteed by making the > accept > window zero. There is then no reason to carry on computing after the reward > window closes, since you know your peers will reject it. > >> > (2) For the network clock; see util.cpp:GetAdjustedTime(). >> >> 1) This is part of the satoshi client but not the protocol. A miner >> can rewrite this part of the code and there won't be anything in the >> chain that contradicts the protocol. > > Well yes. What does that matter? It's only a way of calculating an average > time. The node can use any clock it wants, as long as the block time is > verified by the peers. > >> 2) I haven't read the code but I'm pretty sure that's not a perfect >> decentralized clock. > > It definitely isn't. NTP is mentioned in the source as an alternative. > >> I will be more specific. Where's the network clock in the chain (in >> the protocol)? > > It's nothing to do with the protocol; it's an individual miner choosing > whether to accept or reject a block based on the timestamp it claims, and > the > current time as the miner sees it. For the sake of compatibility, the > clients > currently choose to use a community clock as "current", as established from > the time they receive from peers in the "version" message (it actually holds > offsets between them, which is pretty bad, as a long-connected client will > drift). They don't have to, but if miners aren't using time that > approximates > what their peers are using, under my system, their blocks would be rejected: > so an incentive to use that "community clock" exists. > > > > Andy > > -- > Dr Andy Parkins > andypark...@gmail.com > -- Jorge Timón ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
