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A comment on Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides. Parent comment

Re:Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides by sp332 on Sunday April 01, 2018 @07:06PM (#16731057)
Nope, any bitcoin client can verify any transaction very easily. (Bootstrapping by verifying every transaction in the blockchain does take a while though.) Proof of work is only to prevent a 51% attack where someone spins up enough bots to hijack "consensus" and rewrite transaction history. That's why the difficulty can be dialed up or down - most of the work in mining is not related to verifying the transactions.
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Re:Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides by psychedelic on Sunday April 01, 2018 @08:35PM (#16731403)
Yes. People often misunderstand that verifying transactions with blockchain is intrinsically difficult which is not the case. The hard part is making a ledger that can't be rewritten.

And mining is actually less akin to solving math problems and more akin to, well, actually mining. That is, digging around enough until you find some gold.

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