Quote from: patvarilly on July 11, 2011, 06:46:10 AM

Quote from: casascius on July 09, 2011, 04:57:02 PM

Satoshi's algorithm is much better. If you switch away from weighting with the sum of difficulties, and go to the sum of log of difficulties, you introduce a new vulnerability into easily taking over the block chain. That's because someone could make a very long chain of "difficulty 1" blocks and they could quickly be made to weigh more than blocks being created at the current difficulty n, because they are n times more difficult to create, but only weigh log n, which is a much smaller proportion of n as n increases. All while difficulty 1 blocks will weigh the most in proportion to their actual creation difficulty. So this idea is a bunch of nonsense, merely adds unwarranted complication at the expense of security.

+1. This was pretty clear from the start of the thread. The rest of the thread has just devolved into metaphysical blah-blah nonsense about time, entropy, the universe and everything. Believe me, I do research in statistical mechanics for a living: I think of entropy long and hard every day. The full contents of this thread is a hodgepodge of big words patched together with duct-tape.

Surely then you can take a few of the more prominent claims of this thread and debunk [or critique] them then instead of asking us to 'just trust you' TM? Really, your post adds nothing to a scientific debate as it currently stands.

johanatan

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