316 sats \ 2 replies \ @nullcount 17 Jul \ on: I have read the Satoshi´s white paper bitcoin_beginners
According to page 8 of the Bitcoin whitepaper, if a single miner has more than 45% of hashpower (as Antpool likely does). We should be requiring upwards of 300 block confirmations to reduce the probability of a reorg to 0.1% for that transaction.
Since there are miners with ~50% hashrate, anyone who only accepts a tx after only 3-6 confs is still facing a 20-30% probability that their tx could be undone by the miner (if the miner wanted to).
If you mine BTC, consider joining a pool which is not a proxy of Antpool or Foundry. Or better yet, switch to solo mining.
If you don't mine BTC, you can spread awareness of the pool centralization issue. You can also demand that any transactions you do in BTC require at least a couple hundred block confirmations (wait a couple days) before you call the transaction settled. If enough people acted rationally in this regard, it may be enough of an inconvenience to spark action.
However, most BTC users are still comfortable accepting 6-confirmations and trusting the largest miner won't reorg their tx.
Thanks for the explanation, I did not get this part quite clear from the paper.
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Agree on all of that. I would say that statistically it's very likely for your transaction to be in the reorged timechain, because if it were included in a block in the first place, it means that the miner found it economically reasonable. Thus, a timechain reorg would simply change the hash of the block your transaction is included in, most likely.
This excluding the fact that a reorg could be malevolent, for example a reorg financed by a nation state aimed at mining empty blocks. In such a case, your transaction will not be included in the reorged timechain anymore. But that's a bit of a corner case I guess
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