Gavin: Minority branch

What happens if a majority of people reach consensus and a small portion of computing power, merchants, or exchanges decide to support an opinion that is inconsistent with the majority:

Will there be two Bitcoins? Will there be a disruptive disruption to the Bitcoin economy? Are your coins still safe?

(If you’re anxious, spoiler alert: the answers to the three questions above are: no, no, and yes)

Before starting the analysis, we make the following assumptions:

Assume that now the vast majority (e.g. 2/3, or far more than 50%) of the forces want to support one consensus solution, and a small number of people want to support another solution. That is, the following analysis does not apply to the case of equal support.

At the same time, we also assume that computing power and trading users are on the same front, that is, the following analysis does not apply to situations where computing power and trading users (exchanges/merchants/users) disagree.

So, let's assume that the blockchain really forks, with a main branch and a side branch. The main branch is supported by the majority of computing power and users, while the side branch has only a small amount of support. Once this happens, the lengths of the main chain and the side branch will quickly become different. Let's take a look at the situation where the side branch and the main branch have a 20:80 power split (main branch 80: side branch 20), and their consensus schemes remain almost unchanged in other aspects:

Over the next 17.5 days, the main chain will produce a block every 12.5 minutes on average until the difficulty is adjusted and the rate returns to 1 block every 10 minutes.

What about the miners on the side branch? On average, they can only produce one block every 50 minutes, and this situation will last for 70 days until the computing power on the side branch is adjusted.

For miners on the side branches, a significant difference from the past is that they have to wait 100 blocks (Translator’s note: the block maturity time of the mining pool, see the information translated by Dr. Shentu Qingchun), or 3.5 days, before they can use the newly mined coins, and the prerequisite is that others are willing to accept the coins on such side branch blockchains and provide services and goods in exchange.

For minority (side branch) miners, the real question is whether anyone is willing to accept these newly mined "minority coins"? And what might the value of these coins be?

It is difficult to transact securely on the side branch. Because transactions after the fork that were not spent before the fork will be valid on both chains. And if both blockchains accept these transactions, then "pay me 11 minority coins" and "pay me 11 mainstream coins" are exactly the same. If the minority coins are not as valuable as the mainstream coins, this will be a big problem to consider.

And the minority coins will inevitably be less valuable than the mainstream coins. This is because they (the minority coins) are almost uncompetitive, they take longer to confirm, fewer people are willing to accept them, there is less computing power to protect these coins, and it is much more difficult to trade them securely.

The above problem is the reality that a small number of miners who are determined to disagree with the mainstream opinion will soon face: each newly mined "minority coin" will have to wait more than three days before it can be used normally. This situation can easily cause the value of these "minority coins" to fall to almost zero.

If they resist...

If the minority makes significant changes to the existing consensus rules, they can circumvent many of the problems listed above. For example, resetting the difficulty directly can solve the problem of slow confirmation. Changing the PoW algorithm directly can eliminate the risk of being attacked by some mainstream miners (which I have not yet discussed separately). Modifying the transaction format can make the transaction no longer valid on both chains, so that you don’t accidentally send 11 "mainstream coins" to someone else when you actually wanted to send him 11 "minority coins".

However, if the methods listed above are adopted, it will be a huge change to Bitcoin, which is no different from directly creating a copycat coin. There are many such coins (one of which even attempts to run an experiment "starting from the Bitcoin ledger"). But all of them cannot cause subversive damage to the Bitcoin economy, nor will they threaten Bitcoin holders.

A minority faction, not even a threat.

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Original link http://gavinandresen.ninja/minority-branches
Original author: Gavin Andresen
Translator: Zhong Yin, first published by Babbitt
Bitcoin thank you address: 1JpazvbnCqFzhLvaVncoCkbWXNoWbgeS6Q