Thanks alot for your detailed reply, Danny!
This helps me alot in understanding the fundamentals, and I even have some more stupid questions - sorry for that, just repond if they are not too crackbrained, I'm almost too tired to think everything through, now
How would you estimate the effort for editing a chain, and how hard would it be to change the binary data?
Is it enough to modify the public key in the database/binary data or wherever it's stored to erase an address and could it affect the balances of other addresses?
What happens if there is any kind of inconsistency in the chain? Would it still be vailid?
So theoretically one could attack the chain and fork from the last checkpoint if one had enough hashpower to catch up with the network?
Does the network protect itself by updating the checkpoints?
And I think there was little misunderstanding. What I actually wanted to ask is if it's possible to modify the client's source code to find blocks more quickly by changing the average time to solve a block from 10 minutes to 10 microseconds or something like that - not modiying the timestamp. i guess not, diff would be too low, and it would probably already have destroyed btc a long time ago.
This helps me alot in understanding the fundamentals, and I even have some more stupid questions - sorry for that, just repond if they are not too crackbrained, I'm almost too tired to think everything through, now
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In your newly created altcoin? Sure. There are a variety of ways you could maintain balances that you want, and remove balances you don't want.
Cool. But how to approach? I guess you cannot do anything with rpc-commands but have to use Berkeley for that.How would you estimate the effort for editing a chain, and how hard would it be to change the binary data?
Is it enough to modify the public key in the database/binary data or wherever it's stored to erase an address and could it affect the balances of other addresses?
What happens if there is any kind of inconsistency in the chain? Would it still be vailid?
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As long as your chain satisfies the other requirements of the protocol? Sure.
And those requirements would be? Is there some kind of technical doc?Quote
Each block has a reference to the block before it. You would have to choose which previous block you want to fork from. Then you would have to create blocks faster than the the rest of the network is updating the current chain until your chain has more blocks than the current one.
So theoretically one could attack the chain and fork from the last checkpoint if one had enough hashpower to catch up with the network?
Does the network protect itself by updating the checkpoints?
And I think there was little misunderstanding. What I actually wanted to ask is if it's possible to modify the client's source code to find blocks more quickly by changing the average time to solve a block from 10 minutes to 10 microseconds or something like that - not modiying the timestamp. i guess not, diff would be too low, and it would probably already have destroyed btc a long time ago.