[Cryptography] Bitcoin, litecoin, vertcoin, and derivatives

[Peter Todd]

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On 4 July 2014 22:08:15 CEST, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
>On 1 July 2014 12:11, Natanael <natanael.l at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Most proof-of-stake coins that aren't dead already have checkpoints
>in the
>> blockchain managed by the developer (making it centralized).
>
>And this is different from Bitcoin how?

Bitcoins checkpoints only exist to mitigate a DoS attack when you sync up a new node. They're always quite out of date and wouldn't help against a 51% attack in any meaningful way - reverting a few weeks/months of transactions would destroy Bitcoin anyway.

FWIW Pieter Wuille is working on a new block download algorithm that will allow checkpoints to be removed from Bitcoin Core.
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