Topic: Why not 10 coins per block and a block every 2 minutes? (Read 5966 times)

This is the real bji, right?

I certainly did intend to directly and personally tease you with Moynihan's quote because I hope we've all been arguing not between differences of opinion but assertions of fact.


I then continued to quote your post, commenting throughout. I agreed with you that this thread has had multiple sub-threads and I tried to address those diversions as I saw them. My veiled insult ("Honest nodes will acknowledge defeat, malicious nodes will not, much like this thread") was a side note directed at the general inconclusive sub-threads and the posters who propagated them, not to you specifically. I hope you will accept my apology. I sincerely did not mean to single you out, but I can see that by quoting you exclusively, that is what I've done. I am sorry.

More than any other post, I appreciated your attempt to put your argument in numbers. Despite Kjj pointing out the limited domain, I hoped to see revised attempts to quantifying the difficulty of a double-spend attack, both within a few blocks and over a sustained attack.

I will admit defeat if you will admit that these veiled insults you post are uncalled for,

Something must be wrong with the forum.  That post is attributed to me but I didn't write it, although I think the points are all valid and good.

By making the block time faster the risk from shorter confirmation or the number of confirmation needed to reduce risk is increased. This is a cost to all bitcoin users, especially since its users can suffer from the loss of confidence in addition to the loss itself.

tl;dr stop mining from deepbit

Not to me or the rest of the network.  Such harm is limited to you, the seller who didn't take prudent steps.  Have you ever bought a car from a dealership wherein you were not in the dealership for at least 30 minutes?  This does not qualify as lasting harm in the context of bitcoin itself or the network.

  "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. But, Senator, you are not entitled to your own facts"
     -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003 or James R. Schlesinger, 1973

Yes. There are those discussing probabilities to override a single block and there are those discussing double spending attacks in general. No one argues that a node with 1% hashing power has a 1% chance of taking a block if he begins at the same time as all other honest nodes. No one argues that a node with 40% hashing power has some slight chance of taking two blocks. But if we discuss a real attack, involving multiple blocks, the difference between 40% and 51% is enormous. While a 40% attacker might be immediately lucky, if he's not he should give up. On the other hand a 51% attacker is GUARANTEED to override the block chain eventually.

While you can complain about a PROOF involving unlimited time and resources, you can not dispute the fact that the 40% attacker has an unlikely chance which becomes exceedingly more unlikely with time, while a 50+% attacker has a likely chance which becomes more likely with time.



NO. This is only true on the first block attempt. These chances rapidly diverge with each subsequent honest block generation.



YES, but NO. Not unless you are discussing competing malice or network isolation. Honest nodes will acknowledge defeat, malicious nodes will not, much like this thread.



I didn't follow your train of thought completely, but... just because we feel certain that 6 confirmations is written in stone, that stone can always theoretically be broken, with transactions reversed Dwolla style.



Let me interrupt again. The attacker only needs to generate 7+ before the honest nodes generate 6, perhaps a few more for good measure.

51% is a magic number.  For an offline attack, 51% is the point where if you start right now, you can be sure that you will be some number of blocks ahead in the future, if you wait long enough.  Really 50% + 1 is the magic number, but we round to 51%.


Yes, miners delete pending transactions if they are seen in a new block coming in from the network.  But when there is a reorganization, all transactions that were in the invalid blocks and not also in the newly valid blocks are automatically put back into the queue, after validating them using the transactions from the new blocks.

The disconnect is that there are alot of competing threads within this thread and the comments are all fragmented within these discussions, and you're taking that as an opportunity to assume that nobody understands bitcoin.  It is rude to tell everyone that they don't understand bitcoin because there are differences of opinion.

Yes, I have read the white paper, and yes, I understand it.  The point being argued, at least that I was arguing, is against this notion that 51% is some magical number.