The fact that the miners are scattered all around is good in some sense and bad in others.

Should anything happen that would disrupt the power grids and/or transcontinental Internet connections, we would immediately have several separated "islands" of block chains that would start living life of their own. The common term for this scenario is "forking".

The problems arise from the fact that when the connections are restored, the chain with the most work put to it is going to win; i.e. the forks that have less work done would in effect become invalid, invalidating all work and all transactions that have happened in that fork after the forking.

If all mining would stop the moment a fork happens, it would be relatively easy to merge the chains later on. However, if we have several forks that all have work (hashing power) put to them, sorting the mess out later on would be very difficult if not impossible.

It baffles me why this issue has been so completely ignored. Many seem to believe nothing will ever happen that would break the international Internet connections in a way that would lead to problems described in this thread. However, both common sense and hard facts clearly show that such ultimate trust to the capability of Internet to persist are completely unfounded. All that is needed is one underwater volcanic eruption at the right spot, one big enough coronal mass ejection from the Sun, or one carefully targeted terrorist attack (false flag or real deal) and the block chains of all crypto currencies would be in chaos.

The fact that Bitcoin has many users does not make it one bit less vulnerable - in fact it's exactly the other way around, since big number of users would mean big amounts of transactions and mining taking place in each fork.

I've been putting significant amounts of time and energy into finding solutions that would minimize the risk of forking shoud, for example, Europe and Americas become disconnected from each other. As a systems architect with a background in security and disaster planning I see this not as a doomy & gloomy scenario but rather as a very interesting and inspiring challenge. There are ways to minimize the risk. I'll get back to those in a moment in another reply to this thread.

- Jyri
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Altcoin.Center