Electronic money

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Sun Dec 7 10:17:48 GMT 2014


On Fri, 05 Dec 2014 20:47:42 -0000, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:


> Consider the following thought experiment. I am an Evil Genius, with a  
> Lot
> of Computers.
>
> I go away for a year and mine bitcoins on my own version of the chain.
> Because I have a LoC, I can do this faster than the rest of you.
>
> When the year ends, I present my longer chain, and under the Holy Rules  
> of
> Bitcoin, all of the last year of mining and transactions goes away.
>
> Clearly this situation is untenable. The solution? Checkpoints.
>
> Those who set the checkpoints are the central authority.

AIUI, if you mine a bitcoin (and coincidentally someone else mines the  
same one), then the first to register it in the Ledger takes preference  
(AFAIK, the mineable bitcoins have no predefined order). Anyway, it is all  
described in Wikipedia, and I don't think your situation would cause any  
problem.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own  
thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131                         Web:  
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU,  
U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4  
AB A5



More information about the ukcrypto mailing list