this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
988 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
5353 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Right. Which is not what I was talking about. This was about how a PoW chain would become useless if there was no cost involved in making blocks, ie, if the "W" part was missing. It would allow anyone to add blocks. There'd be no way to distinguish forks from each other and decide on a canonical one. Being able to agree on a particular fork as being the "valid" one in a decentralized manner is the fundamental secret sauce of what makes cryptocurrency work. All the various protocols boil down to ways of solving that one particular problem.
even a 51% attack is just the protocol following its prescribed mechanisms.
Yes. But failing at the intent of the protocol in the process. When a hacker exploits a buffer overrun to take control of a remote computer, the computer is following its prescribed mechanisms to the letter. But that's certainly not what the computer's owner wants it to be doing.
If adding blocks to a PoW chain had no cost then the chain wouldn't be functioning as its users desire - there'd be no canonical fork any more. It would fail to solve the Byzantine generals problem, which is fundamentally the purpose of cryptocurrency.