Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: using Shannon's information to measure proof-of-work
by
johanatan
on 11/07/2011, 08:14:28 UTC
Satoshi's algorithm is much better.  If you switch away from weighting with the sum of difficulties, and go to the sum of log of difficulties, you introduce a new vulnerability into easily taking over the block chain.  That's because someone could make a very long chain of "difficulty 1" blocks and they could quickly be made to weigh more than blocks being created at the current difficulty n, because they are n times more difficult to create, but only weigh log n, which is a much smaller proportion of n as n increases.  All while difficulty 1 blocks will weigh the most in proportion to their actual creation difficulty.  So this idea is a bunch of nonsense, merely adds unwarranted complication at the expense of security.

+1.  This was pretty clear from the start of the thread.  The rest of the thread has just devolved into metaphysical blah-blah nonsense about time, entropy, the universe and everything.  Believe me, I do research in statistical mechanics for a living: I think of entropy long and hard every day.  The full contents of this thread is a hodgepodge of big words patched together with duct-tape.

Surely then you can take a few of the more prominent claims of this thread and debunk [or critique] them then instead of asking us to 'just trust you' TM?  Really, your post adds nothing to a scientific debate as it currently stands.