imnotatwork
Also, moving some transactions off-chain transaction will effectively mix the coins and strenght anonymity.
Like saying that the first calculator was not a new kind of machine because valves existed and people made calculations before.
If you mean that over time the incentive to centralization become stronger, yes, you are right. There must be competition to enter the blocks, otherwise when mining subsidy ends, there will be no incentive to secure the ledger.
If you mean that ten times the transaction have a computational cost 10 times greater (or 5, or 2), you're wrong.
> The whole point of the system is to verify transactions and it stops working if it doesn't do that.
Plenty of cryptocurrencies are mining tons of empty blocks. on the short term, if there are no transactions, mining continues with the same difficulty.
The effect is long term: if noone is using the currency for transaction, it has no value so less and less people mine it. The difficulty drops, and the security drops, pulling value down even more.
You are almost right, but it is a very indirect effect, and takes years to manifest itself.
Numbers i said are my guesses, but the order of magnitude should be about that.
I don't remember exactly how many hash ops you have to do to put 1000 txes in a merkle tree, but it should be more than 1000 and less than 10000.
My point was exactly that. Computational cost of the merkle tree is negligible when confronted with the computational cost of the POW
Besides , how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened?
And it would only take a single node connected to both sides (land and satellite?), to undo all the work of the would be attacker.
Proof of work means that the lucky random miner has invested energy on a previous valid block, and is lucky enough to find another valid block.
If you take that away, you could as well use a database and a trusted timestamp server.