Author Topic: [BITCOIN] WARNING: blockchain split  (Read 1298 times)

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Offline xeroc

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This seems like a pretty major issue to me....is it not?
Issue ia about about how to efficiently upgrade the protocol(tm) ... dpos woth voted hatd forks have an advantage here

Offline Ben Mason

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This seems like a pretty major issue to me....is it not?

Offline fav

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https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1108304.0

good explanation of the problem:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1108304.msg11787367#msg11787367
Quote from: Quantus
Every one calm the fuck down. The problem is not fixed but right now its not a problem.

Here are the events leading up to this.

This is what happened; large mining pools in china found out many months/years ago that they could make more money if they didn't wast any time adding transactions to the blocks they mined. You see adding transactions to blocks takes extra time, time they could have been mining. This allowed them to broadcast their found blocks just a little bit faster. Giving them a slight 1% edge over other miners the same size. But then to save even more time they stopped checking the authenticity of blocks coming in from other miners they felt were trusted.

Now do you remember the whole Bitcoin transaction malleability scare? The one Mount' Gox said caused them to lose all there bitcoins? That event was fixed with a patch but this patch would
only be implemented if 75% of the network agreed to it. Tonight one of the mining farms in china got a bad block that didn't meet the requirements in that patch but broadcast that block saying that it did.  Other Chines mining farms took the block without checking to see it was in fact au8thentic and started building/mining with it/off it/on top of it... Causing a very large orphaned chain. 

Could it happen again? yes unless something changes. It fixed itself tonight but in the future with fewer and fewer full nodes around the world and larger and larger blocks this will only get worse. The larger the blocks the slower the network.

Note: thread not related to bitshares, however, it's urgent. I'll move it after 24 hours to random