[Cryptography] ghash.io hits 50% of the Bitcoin compute power

[Nemo]

"John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com> writes:

> Well, OK, how about if it started hearing that there was a fork at
> 279,001?

Then it would follow its Prime Directive and accept as Truth whichever
fork represented the greatest total sum of work, where "work" is defined
per block as the expected number of hashes a miner would have to try to
generate the block (see https://self-evident.org/?p=995).

Such temporary forks are not unexpected and are, in fact, inevitable
when two miners happen to a valid block sufficiently close together in
time. That is why the more confident you want to be about a Bitcoin
transaction having actually happened, the longer you have to wait.

 - Nemo