hey i have an idea. what if someone who is fully caught up posted their ip address here and i set that as my only well known peer. then i would have to get the right blockchain. right?
only if you banned all other peers, and just because someone is caught up doesn't mean they wont prove to have been on a fork later.. let the system figure itself out and remember, this is alpha.
well idk exactly what the code looks like but ideally even if you have 100 peers who all say the block chain is 2000 blocks long, if only 1 person says the blockchain is 2100 blocks long, you ping that person, ask for proof and if he supplies proof than the other 100 dont matter, you just ignore them. If i only have 1 known peer than i would have to be getting my other peers through him. even if he supplied me with 100 peers who all had the wrong chain it wouldnt matter because i would KNOW that i was connected to him and i would know that he had the right chain.
yeah and if he was faking it and you believed him and did a transaction then you lose. how would you KNOW he had the right chain? because he said so?
it is possible that he would only be sharing phony peers with you and that there was actually a longer chain out there somewhere that he wouldnt tell you about. still i dont understand how i can be connecting to so many of the peers from this list https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4178253 and not a SINGLE one of them knows of a SINGLE chain that is longer than 26244 blocks. its not a democracy, you dont need some majority to agree on what is the right chain, all i need is ONE person to be able to tell me about a longer chain. i just dont get it.
