Re:PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
by codexon on Friday November 15, 2019 @11:39PM
(#21551046)
As far as I can tell, GHOST is only used to mitigate high hash power loss when confirmation times are lowered to 15 seconds.
Orphaned blocks are very rare in Bitcoin.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks?offset=0
Even if you somehow saved all this wasted hash power, you would only maybe increase hash power by less than 1%!!!
Read my comment here for more details.
Re:PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub
by DennisP on Saturday November 16, 2019 @06:48PM
(#21555677)
Sounds like we vehemently agree. Orphaned blocks are indeed rare in Bitcoin, because they have ten-minute block times. GHOST only helps when block times are so short that you get lots of orphaned blocks.
And that's how Ethereum gets away with 15-second blocks.
In Bitcoin, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower in the linear chain behind it. Abandoned forks contribute nothing to that.
With GHOST, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower descended from it, in all forks. This way all the forks contribute to a block's security.
With a linear chain, propagation time is an issue. If blocks are too short it's more likely that miners will find more than one candidate block, causing the work on abandoned blocks to be wasted. With GHOST, no work is wasted.
The original GHOST paper, which proposed the algorithm as a modification to Bitcoin, has some math to calculate, for a given propagation time, the block time that would produce equivalent security to a linear chain. It was significantly shorter.