Re: [bitcoin-dev] Introducing a POW through a soft-fork

2017-11-06 Thread Devrandom via bitcoin-dev
A hard-fork is a situation where non-upgraded nodes reject a block mined and relayed by upgraded nodes. This creates a fork that cannot heal regardless of what follows. This proposal is not a hard-fork, because the non-upgraded node *will heal* if the attack has less than 1/2 of the original-POW

[bitcoin-dev] Centralizing mining by force

2017-11-06 Thread Robert Taylor via bitcoin-dev
Forgive me if this has been asked elsewhere before, but I am trying to understand a potential failure mode of Bitcoin mining. A majority of miners can decide which valid blocks extend the chain. But what would happen if a majority of miners, in the form of a cartel decided to validly orphan any

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Generalised Replay Protection for Future Hard Forks

2017-11-06 Thread Jacob Eliosoff via bitcoin-dev
Thanks Mats, this proposal makes sense to me (especially the idea of fork-specific addresses). It prevents replay across forks, and makes it easy for client software, and thus potentially users, to specify which fork a tx is for. But, like other (rougher) past proposals I've seen, it does little

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Introducing a POW through a soft-fork

2017-11-06 Thread Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev
If a block that would be discarded under previous rules becomes accepted after a rule addition, there is no reason to not simply call the new rule a hard fork. IOW it's perfectly rational to consider a weaker block as "invalid" relative to the strong chain. As such I don't see any reason to

Re: [bitcoin-dev] Introducing a POW through a soft-fork

2017-11-06 Thread Devrandom via bitcoin-dev
> > Note how you're basically proposing for the block interval to be decreased, >> which has security implications due to increased orphan rates. >> > > Note that the total transaction rate and block size don't materially > change, so I don't > see why the orphan rate will change. Normal blocks

[bitcoin-dev] Generalised Replay Protection for Future Hard Forks

2017-11-06 Thread Mats Jerratsch via bitcoin-dev
Presented is a generalised way of providing replay protection for future hard forks. On top of replay protection, this schema also allows for fork-distinct addresses and potentially a way to opt-out of replay protection of any fork, where deemed necessary (can be beneficial for some L2