What has not been explored AFAIK, is what if the nomadic mint's KSI calculation had a publicly visible component that could be cross-checked by any client? I.e. if the hash function had to mix in a widely observable source of chaos, such as the S&P 500 index closing price or solar flux index. People might relax about cooperation if the public could "trust, but verify" the calculations of the population of nomadic mints subject to attack by a powerful adversary. KSI + chaos could be immutable in the past (cannot reconstruct a historical hash with KSI) and the future (chaotic processes are immune to time series forecasting).
Scumby,
What you say is very interesting. Satoshi designed the current Bitcoin proof-of-work system to prevent an adversary from presenting a forged blockchain as legitimate. My approach makes that difficult by having only one canonical version of the blockchain, in which the current hash is widely known, in which participants are identified by certificates, and in which misbehavior is detected by verifying peers.
KSI + chaos could be immutable in the past (cannot reconstruct a historical hash with KSI) and the future (chaotic processes are immune to time series forecasting).
This is a desirable property for the blockchain or agent logs. I want to understand the circumstances allowing an adversary to forge such a blockchain. I seem to comprehend how a KSI + chaos blockchain could be tamper-evident, but the forgery attack is one in which the adversary replays transactions from some point in the history, with some change in their own favor, recalculating the merkle trees and block hashes at each step. The forged block chain is thus internally consistent with no evidence of tampering unless compared with the final block hash of the legitimate blockchain.
Does KSI as you understand it somehow make replaying of the blockchain building process impossible - as I described that process above?
Even if not, your mentioning of a public chaos value is a good idea for convincing observers that the blockchain was not constructed prior to the timestamp associated with the public chaos value. I could use the daily radio flux at 10.7 cm as reported by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center, or can anyone suggest something published and archived by a more international source?