Re:No, you don't need a blockchain
by swift532 on Friday November 02, 2018 @04:16PM
(#18366349)
I think the instability of the past (contentious forks, DAO, anything else) are growing pains, but with enough time I believe it's possible that we as a sort of hive mind will settle on something more permanent and stable because, at one point, it'll be in noone's interest to fragment the network.
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Re:No, you don't need a blockchain
by adamrezich on Friday November 02, 2018 @05:40PM
(#18366994)
>because, at one point, it'll be in noone's interest to fragment the network
It will always be in someone's interest to attempt to take control of a network, thus eventually causing opposition interest to fork the network, thus continued fragmentation and impenetrability w.r.t. normal users
Basically, how do you solve the "government and/or private individual/group with enough wealth and/or access to resources can take control of a cryptocurrency by acquiring majority consensus" problem?
In proof of stake, that could be a problem (though there are mechanisms people claim can handle it). But in a proof of work currency, having majority consensus would mean they'd have to have the majority of miners - and even then they have to follow the rules because users' nodes will just reject invalid blocks. And in the worst of cases, people can fork away, and if they change the PoW algorithm while doing so - they'll also render the malicious actor's ASICs useless.
I'm not saying this is fool proof, but the innovation of Bitcoin is precisely the system which is designed to resist these things (again, it's still very hard).