Re:We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
by not2b on Monday October 03, 2022 @09:05PM
(#33075638)
Couldn't they just use a Merkle tree, like git does, to keep track of the history? I think that's what he's referring to here. They don't need proof of work if the code that can modify the history is trusted.
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Re:We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
by cottenio on Monday October 03, 2022 @09:13PM
(#33075705)
As a huge fan and experienced implementer of merkle trees in my modern work I really wish I had known what they were at the time :)
Merkle trees don’t solve the forgeability issue, just the unbroken chain of what you currently have. So, if you have control over the server you can just create a set of events with your “+5 billion gold” event injected in it, recalculate the tree and root and voila: forgery.
PoW doesn’t prevent this, it just adds computational time provably spent between the events so that if you DID try to inject a false record a year ago you’d have to spend that same amount of time calculating the resulting merkle tree.
Merkle trees all the way down!