Quote from: jl777 on February 26, 2016, 04:03:37 AM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 26, 2016, 03:32:09 AM

I assume you mean writing some meta-data into the stronger block chain, that the weaker block chain could refer to as evidence. The hindrance is that decentralized block chains have no external reference point. There is no way to enforce that a particular block in one chain came before a block (nor within some # of blocks after a block) on another chain. Block chains are self-referential, and that is precisely why we need CLTV to implement decentralized exchange.

OK, so we are in agreement on most everything.

I want to better understand the above as it seems the main issue to prevent much stronger security. I apologize if I am asking kindergarten level questions on this, but I dont understand the external reference point impossibility. Please bear with me.

Apologies in advance to readers that I will spew a lot of words about the phrase, "kindergarten level questions". I just feel awkward because I don't desire to measure myself or others that way. My intent is all about maximizing production (of myself and others). And I have weaknesses and commit lapses of logic (or insufficient research) sometimes/often.

I didn't mean to belittle anyone's sincere inquiries. Apologies if that seemed to be my tone upthread. To any degree that I felt frustration upthread, it was due to for example when someone conflates 'theory' with "highly abstract mathematical structural fact" and my frustration being not with them (for how can they understand my confidence in some insight if I don't explain it to them) because it is my problem if I am too low on energy or time to explain that distinction. Again it isn't the fault of another person that sometimes I am thinking/articulating in abstractions. And I don't make any claim about relative knowledge or capabilities (except to trolls and intentionally condescending people who deserve to have a mirror put in their face, which is not you James). I just tend to think in abstractions often, but not always (obviously I also think in terms of implementation and example cases otherwise I wouldn't have also written 100,000+ lines of commercially successful code as you have James). I just grow weary sometimes, because verbiage on forums has to repeated over and over for each person. I have 10,000+ posts already on this site. Lol. James your effort on implementing DE is worthy of my reciprocal effort (as you know I've told you that I hope your DE is available for the altcoin I am working on). Apologies the past few days have been exhausting/distracting/struggle for me as I alluded to about my health. Also I am reasonably burned out from too many posts on these forums over the past 3 years in contagion with the chronic health debacle/suffering I've been battling. Again apologies if I don't always communicate with perfect attention to apparent tone and with careful/optimum eludication.

Quote from: jl777 on February 26, 2016, 04:03:37 AM

I like concrete examples:

At noon, BTC block noon_txid appears. This is available to the entire bitcoin p2p network. At first it is a bit vulnerable to a reorg due to any pair of linked blocks would override it. After the next block, it would take 3 blocks to overtake, etc. So after 2 hours, we are past the timestamp variance and also have 10+ blocks protected by zillions of hashes.

ALL the altcoin chains can refer to this noon_txid. Let us call it noon_txid_inalt. I am pretty sure this is possible to do. And I am pretty sure that the presence of noon_txid_inalt proves that it came AFTER noon_txid. Please let us ignore odds of sha256 collisions.

In my previous post, I said bi-directional. So the BTC blockchain now gets the noon_txid_inalt and puts that into its blockchain (a bit past 2PM). call this the noon_altconfirm txid.

I claim that we now know that noon_txid happened before noon_txid_inalt which happened before noon_altconfirm txid. It looks like I can segregate blockchain events on different blockchains into definite categories of time ordering of "before" and "after"

What part of the above is insufficient to satisfy the requirements for the external reference?

There is no way to prove that the consensus of the weaker block chain placed those meta-data records in the stronger block chain. There is some meta-data, but it is meaningless, because consensus is the entire challenge of decentralized protocols that require consensus.

Off topic note that per the CAP theorem, Bitcoin forsakes Partition tolerance in order to achieve Consistency and Availability of consensus. You can think of the other block chain as being another partition. We've been discussing these abstract theoretical issues over in the Altcoin Discussion forum in threads such as The Ethereum Paradox, DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?), and Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problem. Also include some discussions between monsterer, smooth, and myself in my vaporcoin's thread. So I have the advantage of a few months of discussions about these abstract topics.