Quote from: BitBanana on August 23, 2011, 03:17:26 PM

Quote from: Maged on August 22, 2011, 06:56:14 PM

Quote from: The Pet Board on August 22, 2011, 06:40:21 PM

What are the differences between bitcoin and solidcoin? Is one better than the other?

Basically, all of the secondary blockchain defense mechanisms are removed in favor of convenience.

Could you please elaborate that point a bit? I thought that there were no changes this dramatic made to the bitcoin protocol. or does it have to do with the shorter block generation time?

Thanks!

Alex

p.s. Also, since this is the Newbie-Forum, i'm not sure what "secondary blockchain defense mechanisms" are

The twice-daily difficulty retargets, along with the shorter block generation speed, means that should it be necessary to fork the blockchain because a security issue was discovered and exploited, a patch has to be made and distributed to over half of the miners (in terms of hash speed) AND the fork needs to be grow longer than the bad chain in less than 12 hours (possibly even no more than 6 hours) before mined blocks after the exploit happened start maturing. Even worse, this needs to happen just as soon even if a strong majority of the miners stop mining as soon as they learn of the attack. Once the blocks mature, any site that didn't hear of the issue could be sent coins that would soon be voided and accept them as valid. At that point, even more people will have an incentive to allow the bad chain to remain.

The same applies to if there is a temporary (at least one day) split of the internet somewhere. Users would only have 6-12 hours to notice and stop accepting coins.

Bitcoin was designed with these "limitations" for VERY good reason.