Burn over from hostile miners, it is possible! :)

JasperJasper Eindhoven, the NetherlandsMember Posts: 514 ✭✭✭
edited November 2014 in Watercooler
Say some small subset of miners make all the blocks. Anything >50% can reliably do it. Can a blockchain be designed to do burn-over? Assuming the new blockchain can see the old one.

The hostile miners would be weary of burn addresses, so they'd not accept transactions to them.

But it easy to get around: Start with a secret S then report H(S) to the chain you want to go to. Then send your "hostilecoin" to an address based on H(append(S,N)) H has to be a hash that is "not compatible" with the hash bitcoin already uses for, otherwise you can just pick a public key, and it would not really be burned. At this point, miners cannot tell if it is a new address, or a burn address. Once the transaction is "secure", you reveal S and N, the new blockchain(and everyone) sees it, and can create the coin for you.

As of writing it.. Well a transaction is never really secure if it is owned by miners like that.. On the other hand, the time between providing S and H(S) can be arbitrary, so to censor they'd be reorganizing like mad to "change history", with the transactions censorred.. This would decrease the difficulty of the blocks they're creating, and if the hostilecoin came with a historical reference to a recent previous block hash in any transaction of the hostilecoin would make changing history plain possible.(that previous hash would be signed, and they cant forge the signature) Of course they could try create a history ditching the transactions, but that'd make the entire system useless. (that should be enough to poke the users to hard-fork to another mining algo/PoS)

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