Quote from: Kryptowerk on Today at 03:45:33 PM

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on Today at 11:41:56 AM

Quote from: zezaiement on Today at 11:21:03 AM

The longer fork represents the consensus of the network, as it has accumulated more computational work and has a greater number of participants supporting it.

This is not correct.

As I explained above, the longest chain does not necessarily contain the most accumulated work. I could fork bitcoin right now, drop the difficulty to 1, and then churn out 10,000 blocks in a few minutes. My new chain would be far longer than the main chain, but have much less accumulated work because the number of hashes required to generate all 10,000 of my blocks would only be tiny fraction of the number of hashes to generate a single block on the main chain. The main chain, although shorter, would have the higher amount of work, and so everyone else would stay on that chain and not switch to my longer chain.

Quote from: zezaiement on Today at 11:21:03 AM

By choosing the longer fork, miners align themselves with the majority, reducing the risk of their blocks being orphaned or invalidated in the future.

No, they do this by aligning themselves with the chain with most work, which again, is not the same as the longest chain.

That's a greate explanation and a pretty crucial point. So a difficulty comparison is done every time by just checking the zeros in front of the latest blockhash?

Reading about the accidental-fork-by-miners issue, I remember there was one instance, maybe already 10 years ago, when this happened 6 or seven times in a row. It then became apparent that there was a bug causing this. Need to look up what happened there exactly.

The difficulty of mining is determined by the network protocol and is adjusted periodically based on the target set by the protocol.

In most blockchain systems, including Bitcoin, the difficulty adjustment algorithm takes into account the average time it took to mine a certain number of blocks in the past. If the blocks were mined too quickly, indicating that the network's total computational power exceeds the intended rate, the difficulty is increased. Conversely, if blocks were mined too slowly, the difficulty is decreased.
This is designed to ensure that the average time to mine a block remains relatively constant over time.