Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Potential bug in bitcoin: long-range attacks.
by
jl2012
on 06/05/2014, 14:43:03 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.

He's talking about cumulative, but that's irrelevant. The expected work required for that "super large difficulty block*" equals to the cumulative work of all blocks in the past 5 years

(*ignoring the 4x adjustment rule)