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0 pointsimnotatwork8y ago0 comments

Not a bandaid at all. Unconfirmed transactions in the "lost" chain are bringing fees with them, so it is the exact same incentive of every other transaction.

Besides , how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened?

And it would only take a single node connected to both sides (land and satellite?), to undo all the work of the would be attacker.

0 comments

solatic8y ago

> how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened?

Continental? No. Country-wide? Many, many times.

Imagine being in Egypt during the Arab Spring revolution when the government shut off Internet access. Imagine selling product to people for Bitcoin, seeing your client software accept the transaction because "enough time has passed", and then a few days/weeks later, when Internet access is restored, seeing your wallet balance get clobbered by the much-longer global chain.

/shudder

bascule8y ago

This is no different than, say, watching MongoDB for if it loses your writes, and if it does, replaying them.

This is definitely a band-aid: a good database doesn't lose writes it acknowledged.

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