But none of these time intervals happen in real time or matter to the attacker
in a PoS. They can all be spoofed...You can always broadcast a false chain
and that has always been the problem with PoS.
(Only PoW is resistant to time manipulations because it takes real time
to do the work.)
Can someone explain to me what is really new here?
Hi jonald,
I'd love to go into details about the grinding attack.
Could you clarify a few points for me before we dig in so that I don't paraphrase the paper.
1/What do you mean by "creating a false chain"? Creating a competing chain? I'm not sure what "false" means here.
2/What do you mean by "time intervals can all be spoofed". Of course, the attacker doesn't have to "redo the work" if he can reuse some previously create proofs but in this case his fork (at the beginning) will be a subset of the mainchain.
More generally, could you please provide a detailed description of how you would conduct such an attack (even a high level explanation would be great)
thanks !