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Topic: Decentralized checkpointing? (Read 648 times)

staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
April 27, 2013, 04:08:40 AM
#2
Responses in that thread (I've whitelisted the poster and would move the thread here, but I can't) as thats better than splitting it across two places.
sr. member
Activity: 476
Merit: 251
COINECT
April 27, 2013, 12:43:49 AM
#1
Newbie Calder started an interesting discussion about a Stanford paper on Bitcoin that discussed decentralized checkpointing. The basic idea is for nodes to be skeptical of blocks that change transactions that they themselves witnessed in the past.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/dumb-question-186097

Quote from: Calder
anti-scam is right, you'd have to be careful with the math so you didn't wind up with blockchains accidentally diverging all over the place. Let's give ourselves a few definitions so we're on the same page.

The credibility C of a blockchain is a function of the blocks in that chain. The work W is a measure of how much work went into a given block. The age A of a block is how long ago this node first saw that block. Right now, this looks like:

    C = sum of W(b)

But there's no reason it couldn't look like this:

    C = sum of W(b) * F(A(b))

where F(t) is some function of the a block's age.

The hard part is how you pick for F(t). Discuss!

What do you think? Is a scheme like this feasible?
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