Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Virtual currency without block chain
by
HunterMinerCrafter
on 03/10/2014, 15:48:38 UTC
5. B checks the distributed hash table to verify ownership.

The problem here is that it relies on some assurances that a DHT, alone, cannot provide.  If a DHT registry were "enough" by itself then we would've had a working bitcoin in the mid 90s, trivially.  Unfortunately the "Merkle proof chaining" mechanism of the blocks really is strictly necessary in order to avoid double spend and assure consistent transaction selection and processing.  Without such a mechanism the most simple of attacks against the network could easily be used to disrupt the entire system.