[Cryptography] On the 'regulation proof' aspect of Bitcoin

[Alfie John]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:19:11AM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > Without mining, what you're talking about is simple data replication. You might
> > want to have a look at the the BitTorrent protocol, or even rsync.
> 
> Well the Merkle chain is remarkably resilient by itself.
> 
> Consider a situation in which we have ten independent notaries
> maintaining separate public chains. Every day they take the output
> from every other chain and enroll it as an input. Any attempt at
> rollback now requires every notary to collude and even then the
> defection will be obvious to anyone keeping notes.

So how do you choose your notaries, and how does someone wanting to join the
network become a notary themselves?

The great thing about having a single blockchain is that there are no hurdles
to participate in the network. Mining prevents collusion without the need to
elect these special notary nodes.

> It is pretty easy to see that any system that has chained notaries
> will quickly end up making interchange agreements and that these will
> rapidly converge into one system.

What happens when a single notary is down as syncing happens between notaries?
You're not going to be able to calculate on all chains needed for the mesh, and
so you end up with network lag.

Alfie

-- 
Alfie John
https://www.alfie.wtf