Blockchain at Berkeley

Re:Blockchain at Berkeley by tylersmith on Saturday June 24, 2017 @01:51AM (#14624539)

It's more of a tree with single root and a function returning the longest tip by some distance method. Bitcoin uses amount of work proved as the distance. Bitcoin ignores other tips unless/until one of them becomes longer than the current tip but some systems like Ethereum leverage stagnant branches for their length function.

But yes, dynamic-membership multi-party signature schemes and their use for creating permissionless systems is the real innovation.

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Re:Blockchain at Berkeley by delhanty on Saturday June 24, 2017 @03:15AM (#14624714)

Straight question for the uninformed (me):

Do you (or anyone else) have a technical reference for differences between the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain length function?

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Re:Blockchain at Berkeley by DennisP on Saturday June 24, 2017 @08:56AM (#14625430)

Bitcoin's method is detailed in Satoshi's classic paper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Ethereum uses a variant of the GHOST algorithm, which was introduced in the paper Accelerating Bitcoin’s Transaction Processing: Fast Money Grows on Trees, Not Chains.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf

The Ethereum white paper mentions how they modified it:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g...

Full detail is in their infamously difficult Yellow Paper:

https://github.com/ethereum/yellowpaper

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Re:Blockchain at Berkeley by delhanty on Saturday June 24, 2017 @09:29AM (#14625503)

Thank you for all those links!

I had some idea about the Bitcoin blockchain - also succinctly summarized by @tylerswift.

But the Ethereum material is all new to me. It at least sounds more interesting than "the least interesting".

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