Post
Topic
Board Service Discussion
Re: [GOX] A consensus network, or how to stop a big lose (fork it!)
by
jl2012
on 01/03/2014, 20:14:24 UTC
You do understand you will never convince miners to erase 3,000 blocks of the blockchain however if you did, then Bitcoin is done.  Remember over those 3,000 blocks, newly mined coins have been involved in transactions and this action would double spend all of those.  The coins originally minted would never exist and thus the coins spent wouldn't.  Merchants, other users, exchanges would all see the downstream transactions (which have 6 ro 3,000+ confirmations) suddenly go unconfirmed and invalid.

While this in theory could be done at any time it is generally accepted to be impossible.  I mean if miners by decree can double spend transaction not 1 or 2 confirmations into the blockchain but 3,000 then no receiver can EVER be sure that the transaction is irreversible.  There is a certain level of faith in all currencies that create the perception of value, and Bitcoin is no exception.  Among those fauth, users of bitcoin believe that while it is possible in theory to 51% the network and undo transactions thousands of blocks deep, that it would have such an economic cost that it infeasible.  All users accept this faith or they wouldn't be using bitcoin.  Your proposed action (although I think it has no chance) if successful would break that faith.  Without faith in the irreversibility of transactions, there is no value or utility to Bitcoin.  Bitcoin would be dead.  I am not talking the exchange rate goes down a bit and recovers, I mean completely abandoned as a worthless experiment and development moves on to future systems which don't have the vulnerability (likely some floating checkpoint system which acts as a check to the proof of work).

Desperate goxcoin holders want a fork to get their coins back, and what they will get back are worthless coins.