0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Brunswick 19 Sep 2022 \ parent \ on: The Most Monumental Software Oversight in History? (CONSPIRACY, lol!) bitcoin
The ability of anyone to easily download and verify the entire blockchain is a necessity. That's not to say it's a necessity that everyone do it, but it's the widespread ability to do so that keeps it from being displaced by other forks with bigger cocksize. To depend on miners to be the only ones vested enough to maintain the entire blockchain is to misplace trust. Mining, as you point out, has a tendency to be dominated by big players and therefore cartelization. The "separation of powers" employed by distributed validation is what gives peace of mind to the HODLer which is where the underlying value rests.
The ability of anyone to easily download and verify the entire blockchain is a necessity.
First of all, it is not a necessity, just use SPV.
Secondly, you can download and verify the blockchain without having the whole thing on your hard drive at once. Just keep a running tally of who owns how many bitcoins and store the hashes of the blocks you download. This is basically what is done in light wallets of cryptocurrencies like monero that can't implement bitcoin's SPV.
Basically, the clients can just store the hashes of blocks after they're done verifying. That is sufficient to prevent miners from pulling the wool over their eyes with fake transactions. This is one of the central ideas behind SPV.
To depend on miners to be the only ones vested enough to maintain the entire blockchain is to misplace trust.
It does not matter as nodes that do not mine cannot resist a miner takeover. The only nodes that matter are mining nodes. If there is enough miner collusion to orchestrate a 51% attack, that is sufficient to double spend regardless of what the non-mining nodes do.
There is no separation of powers in bitcoin. The mining nodes have all the power and the non-mining nodes have none. This is the sybil-resistant mechanism
See that satoshi quote I linked. Very few people need to actually download the whole blockchain (miners and large businesses accepting many transactions). The rest can verify without storing it.
reply
SPV isn't for checking the honesty and integrity of the entire blockchain, it's only useful to confirm if YOUR payment was included in a block.
You are trying to have it both ways, on one hand LN wallets are trusting third parties too much and on the other hand you think we should trust the miners more.
What you are missing is that if there is a fork due to miner collusion, and nobody realizes it because only a miner would bother holding the entire blockchain and people are only using SPV with their light wallets, then there is possible all kinds of mischief like arbitrarily changing the miner block reward.
Here is the key: If it's the wallets that hold the verification power, then it's the wallet holders that have the choice of which fork to spend their coins to and therefore which chain the transactions will be submitted to. The "proof of stake" in every HODLer's wallet are what holds the hashpower providers hostage to stay honest.
reply