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June 18, 2011, 03:37:21 PM |
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The "not decentralized" is, I feel, a reasonably valid criticism - however your "solution" is ill-founded because it breaks the double-spend problem. While I wouldn't call it "centralized", Bitcoin does require a non-fragmented network as it's the only way to ensure you're receiving a payment that's not already double-spent. Massaging two forked chains together not only breaks this assumption, but it obliterates the idea of proof-of-work which is required to keep the distributed ledger straight in the first place.
It's more or less the responsibility of the person dealing with the transactions that they ensure they're not only connected to a small subset of the network - for example if your entire country falls off the internet, you would be a fool to accept any Bitcoin payments until connectivity is restored. Honestly though, in that sort of a situation, the vast drop in miners-vs-difficulty on the separated network is likely to mean that a block will never get solved, and almost certainly 6 blocks wouldn't so you probably wouldn't accept the transaction as completed anyway.
But basically all this boils down to "Bitcoin breaks without a functioning internet", to which the response is "no shit".
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