1. A 51% attack only applies to future changes, cannot impact past transactions.
2. Any and all changes to the code are known (no secret attacks where owners sell the assets out from under the company just before filing bankruptcy).
3. High concentrations of votes will impact risk profiles and thus lower value... but they also represent focus and adaptability which can increase value.
Minority stakeholders are protected by keeping all changes slow enough for them to sell prior to the change. If the 51% want to steal the funds of the 1% by dilution the 1% can sell prior to the dilution. This the smaller investor is more liquid than the larger investor.
Minority stakeholders are protected by keeping all changes slow enough for them to sell prior to the change. If the 51% want to steal the funds of the 1% by dilution the 1% can sell prior to the dilution. This the smaller investor is more liquid than the larger investor.
1. A 51% attack only applies to future changes, cannot impact past transactions.
The following practical, concise definitions are helpful in understanding Byzantine fault tolerance:[3][4]
Byzantine fault
Any fault presenting different symptoms to different observers
Byzantine failure
The loss of a system service due to a Byzantine fault in systems that require consensus
1. All full nodes are observers, this means that they serve the purpose of redundancy and irreversibility to a high degree (unlimited). This protects the network against corruption of past progress in a manner that Bitcoin can never guarantee due to the concept of the Last Irreversible Block.
2. All witness nodes are observes that are actively involved in the consensus process, in other words they are required to allow consensus to advance. If 33% of these nodes "fail" then all forward progress is contingent (potentially reversible)
So lets compare this to Bitcoin:
1. If 99% of miners fail and stop producing blocks, consensus will "stop" (fall to 2 blocks per day)
2. Control can be purchased for a marginal increase on the profit associated with mining (not the revenue) and profit margins are constantly shrinking.
3. There are only 3 "generals" that matter in Bitcoin (the large pools) compared to 27 on BitShares
4. In any given set of 6 blocks there will be an average of less than 4 mining pools that confirmed it.
5. Transactions are never irreversible by-protocol, they can always be reversed with enough money.
1. Long range attack is only viable against New Nodes on an ISOLATED network and can be completely eliminated with proper TAPOS accounting. Under TAPOS it is possible to know what percent of the stake has directly confirmed the chain without going through intermediate witnesses. A long-range attack would have to gather keys of individual accounts, not just keys of witnesses.
2. Potentially reversible simply means that they are subject to the longest-chain rule. If a longer chain were to be produced that built off the last irreversible block then the node would automatically switch over to it.
3. The blockchain would not be recoverable if the reason the hash power was taken off line was due confiscation of mining hardware at large centralized farms (bomb, fire, law) and the chip manufacturers were shut down.
4. I was not referring to negative mining attack, I was referring to buying loyalty by guaranteeing an 2x increase in profits to existing miners which. Profits are different from Revenue.
5. Assuming a connected network, no node will automatically switch to any fork that branches prior to the last irreversible block. To reverse that block would require all of the passive observers to manually intervene. If the witnesses are compromised they could attempt to produce an alternative chain, but it would not be recognized as legitimate to active full nodes no matter how long it got. All users of the blockchain would know the proper chain. Compromise of 99% of the witnesses is like the 51% attack on Bitcoin so such an extreme case isn't generally considered possible.
With respect to recovering a proof-of-work chain, lets talk about it in terms of "recovering within a week". If all mining hardware was turned into a unicorn people could still mine with their CPU/GPU, but it wouldn't be profitable and it would take days between blocks.
With respect to recovering a proof-of-work chain, lets talk about it in terms of "recovering within a week". If all mining hardware was turned into a unicorn people could still mine with their CPU/GPU, but it wouldn't be profitable and it would take days between blocks.
That's irrelevant. If you turned all DPOS delegates into unicorns the chain would be unrecoverable excepting for a hard fork.
I think you will need to be careful when describing DPOS as more decentralised than bitcoin when just one account controls the entire network - which is less decentralisation by a long way.
I suspect that with a little economic incentive we could dramatically increase the voter turnout and render worries about this attack vector moot.
For example, charging a 0.1% tax per month on all accounts with more than 1M BTS that are not voting for at least 11 witnesses would really jack up the voter turnout.
I suspect that with a little economic incentive we could dramatically increase the voter turnout and render worries about this attack vector moot.
For example, charging a 0.1% tax per month on all accounts with more than 1M BTS that are not voting for at least 11 witnesses would really jack up the voter turnout.
I wouldn't use the stick personally - I prefer the carrot: active voter participation lowers your fees.
+5%I suspect that with a little economic incentive we could dramatically increase the voter turnout and render worries about this attack vector moot.
For example, charging a 0.1% tax per month on all accounts with more than 1M BTS that are not voting for at least 11 witnesses would really jack up the voter turnout.
I wouldn't use the stick personally - I prefer the carrot: active voter participation lowers your fees.
btc38-public-for-bts-cold has 278M BTS, and 21/27 top witnesses have less than that amount voting them in.