Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Potential bug in bitcoin: long-range attacks.
by
cr1776
on 06/05/2014, 13:09:09 UTC
This isn't a bug because chains are selected in terms of cumulative difficulty not length of chain. Very quickly a node can distinguish the real chain from the fakes.

Then it is even easier to perform this attack, in theory.
All you would have to do is create a whole bunch of low-difficulty blocks with nearly the same timestamp, then after the "difficulty adjustment" in your branch of the blockchain would result in a super large difficulty. Solve that one block and the blockchain is broken.

Note cumulative, not last.