News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Darpa Contract Awarded to Verify Blockchain-Based Integri... by Jasper_ on Thursday September 15, 2016 @06:25PM (#12510354)
> 1 block per second on average

What stops a double-spend or other attacks like that in a 1-second timeframe? The 10 minute threshold of Bitcoin was chosen under belief that the network would be settled after roughly 10 minutes.

Re:Darpa Contract Awarded to Verify Blockchain-Based Integri... by ristoalas on Friday September 16, 2016 @03:42AM (#12512505)
The speed comes from the fact that private and consortium blockchains tend not use Proof of Work (at least not as the only algorithm; you could mix and match, if you wanted to). Instead, such blockchains tend to use voting-based protocols (e.g. Proof of Stake), where a certain subset of nodes are trusted with voting rights, who together vote to approve the next block. In some systems you also have automatic punishments built in to incentivise correct behaviour (i.e., if someone attempts to fork a blockchain --- for example by voting for 2 conflicting forks -- and if other nodes see any evidence of that, the node who attempted the fork could automatically lose their rights as a trusted validator, and may also automatically lose a lot of money or face legal fees.)