Topic: Help a newbie; why is hashing not done once but twice during Bitcoin transaction (Read 1615 times)

1. Bitcoin devs do not have capability to shutdown Bitcoin network.
2. Bitcoin protocol doesn't have checkpoint system.


Also check block split during Bitcoin Qt 0.8 release and how the community handle it, https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/alert-chain-fork-caused-by-pre-08-clients-dealing-badly-with-large-blocks-152030.

I think it's better if I fork the off-the-rails discussion about timestamps on to a Dev & Tech thread.

Apparently it wasn't very decentralized back then in 2010 since bitcointalk forum served as kind of a hub to tell people to stop generating new blocks so that they could roll back the blockchain and start over from a point before the bad transaction happened. It would be alot harder to control a situation like that now since bitcoin is truly more decentralized, as you say.


no one had a choice. that's why they went along with it. otherwise bitcoin would have been destroyed.  but even so, this fix wasn't without its serious issues. people had been sending and receiving bitcoin for about 4 hours until that fix rolled back the blockchain and deleted all their transactions. that's like going to someone's bank account and taking their money back out once it's been deposited and saying "sorry". if that same event happened today instead of 2010, that particular issue would be insanely more serious. how much money is transferred on the bitcoin blockchain in 4 hours? how do you delete that much money from peoples' wallets without a major consequence?


You don't like timestamps in bitcoin you said it's fine as it is. But look at the link you provided in particular this posting:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10332

This user tried the best he could to put timestamps on all of the events related to this overflow incident. He did the best he could with the data he had but that's proof right there that sometimes you need to know "when" and the more accurately you can know when things happened, the better you can understand it. So timestamps aren't so bad. The more accurate they can be the better.

Not only would they not shutdown the network, but they can't. They have absolutely no power to do so because bitcoin is decentralized.

Such a bug has already happened with bitcoin. It is known as the value overflow incident. It happened in 2010, where someone created 184 billion bitcoin out of thin air. You can read about it here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/strange-block-74638-822. Satoshi released a patch to Bitcoin Qt which soft forked the blockchain to undo the bug, but he was powerless to impose it on the network. Instead, we had to rely on nodes choosing to run the new client and then building a chain with enough work to overtake the other chain. That is how decentralized systems work - by consensus of the community, not by one or two people unilaterally deciding to shut down the network.

As pointed out, that does not provide any mechanism for you to trustlessly verify that my timestamps are accurate and not faked.

That external timekeeping source would be subject to the many manipulations that we've talked about, making it poor for global commerce.

what do you think would happen if some bitcoin bug happened where someone minted 1000 bitcoin out of thin air? And kept doing it all day long? Bitcoin devs would shut down the network and roll it back to a particular checkpoint. And then restart the blockchain once they had fixed the bug. It might takes hours or it might take longer to do that though so the bitcoin network could be offline for that time period.

OK.
 

I'm not sure you would need that. All you really need is some external time keeper. For example, here on earth we use the sun as a rough measure of time. You can go outside look up in the sky and estimate what time it is. If you had a very accurate instrument to measure the sun's position then you could estimate the time even more precisely. Now that's not going to get you down to a very precise level. maybe seconds not sure but cosmic time synchronization can get things down to a more precise level and it doesn't require quantum physics. it's a working technology. but kind of a new kid on the block.

This is genuinely an interesting question in how you would do that.

If you had perfect trustless timestamping, you could have a new independent banking method. But I can't conceive of how it would work without the timestamp eventually being tampered with. With any currently conceivable method, a trustless, decentralized timestamp is impossible.

Besides tampering with code, you could modify the time stamp through any number of methods:
add an extra network routing node between the miner and network to cause a latency delay
add extra physical wire between the clock and computing hardware, causing a the node to appear nanoseconds later in time, which could cause collisions
put one of the nodes in orbit, making other nodes appear to sign after the space node which could appear to be a femto-nanoseconds earlier in time due rapid orbiting

Delays in either direction for a network that relies solely on timestamping would eventually result in collisions and insolvable headaches.

You would need a new physics method, like quantum entangled communication that instantaneously communicated with nodes and wasn't hampered by distances in communicating messages, or time dilation from the speed of light for when nodes are put into space/orbit. Current relativity physics says this is impossible to get around. Making a node appear moments in the future or past doesn't matter much for your currencies that don't matter much, but it puts a limit on the ultimate value of your network. Once the value becomes great enough, then someone will break it. No store of value is immune to that process of attempts at being broken as the currency grows in value, but the difference is that bitcoin has withheld its own whereas things like Solana regularly go down. There's no need to introduce more potential flaws to a network especially one that you want to hold immense value.

How about the fact that entire network has gone down for several hours on multiple different occasions, and that the devs have chosen to shut down the network for several hours on multiple other different occasions. It is centralized trash, and even then, it can't keep accurate timestamps.

And even the very first satellite every launched in to orbit, Sputnik 1, had a clear defined purpose and contained instruments to measure the composition of the ionosphere, Earth's magnetic fields, and so on. They didn't just fire a satellite in to space with no goal or reason, just as we shouldn't try to shoehorn timestamps in to bitcoin with no goal or reason in mind.

If some new tech comes along and makes decentralized, trustless timestamps not only possible but also safe, secure, cheap, and fast, then I'm certain someone will launch an altcoin based on that, and it might even do well. But we are nowhere near that yet.

Let's see.

• "Solana is a fast, secure and censorship resistant blockchain", reminds me of something. 
• It isn't innovative. It uses another alibi, which is this meaningless Proof-of-History that is been discussed pages now, to bring more users to the crypto-space. In fact, PoH is their main aspect.
• It has 400 millisecond block times and claims to be able to process up to 710,000 transactions per second. We've seen this in the past; it's neither innovative nor sustainable for decentralization.
• It hypes up NFTs, which also reminds me of someone else' work.
• There has been a network outage which I find justified, since they'd spent most of their time designing the website and improving their social media accounts' growth.
• Solana doesn't have a hard cap. Instead, its supply increases based on this staking yield nonsense.
• There's a "Solana Foundation".

It's the definition of shitcoin.

i just checked and solana is running a little over 2 hours behind real time on their timestamps.  

but that's still no reason to be calling it a "shitcoin". reserve that for something that isn't innovative and just copies other peoples code.


Given that implementing timestamps properly (decentralized, trustless, tamper resistant, etc.) is both difficult and costly, then you need a very good reason to do it, especially when bitcoin works just fine without them.