On 2020-05-26 08:41, other.arkitech wrote:
The unbloated trait is present as well. There is no history to carry on with it acting like an elastic gum (time to sync a new node for instance). The verification taking place to calculate the next state is enough to trust on the state. There is no need to validate the history from the genesis to trust the last state. The truth starts there, on the last block.
This creates the opportunity to inject a fake history with no past through a 51% attack. When there are many transactions, the computers constructing the final consensus hash of the final block, which testifies to the entire immutable consensus past, are necessarily rather few, rather large, and owned by a rather small number of rather wealthy people. Too keep them honest, need a widely distributed history of at least the past few weeks. We need a large number of people making sure, and able to make sure, that the history is consistent from day to day, not just from block to block. We need a system where if one party is persistently unable to get hold of the the transaction justifying unspent transaction output number five million and seven in the block that is a day or so behind the current block, the panic button automatically goes off.