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March 28, 2013, 01:34:51 PM |
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I keep hearing people claim that litecoin's transactions are less secure.
This is false.
The faster transactions are due to the target rate being faster not a weaker algorithm.
Two obstacles have to be passed for transactions to be insecure (we'll ignore malware for the moment):
The possibility of double spends occurs when someone has 51% of the network power.
The possibility of false transactions against large accounts because the algorithm is weak.
A faster target rate has no relevance on the first case. It's the distribution of hashing power that matters not how much hashing power there is in total. The attackers cannot just single someone out. They have to beat the whole network.
It doesn't matter how fast you are at hashing, it matters only how much faster you are than everybody else.
A faster rate because of a weak algorithm would be an issue, but this isn't the case at all with litecoin. The bitcoin network needs a difficulty 1000x of litecoin to reduce payouts to the rate litecoin is at. It takes 1000x as many average speed users to lower the payout rate than it does with litecoin.
Right now I'm mining about 14 litecoins a day at difficulty 100. Bitcoin needed difficulty 100K to reduce to that point. We're talking per day here, not per confirmation.
On the same hardware, it took 1000x as many hashes to reduce the daily payout.
The number of users of bitcoin when ppl were making 14 btc a day was about the same. But here is the main issue: it didn't matter how many hashes people were doing. It only mattered whether one or a few could outrun the whole network.
So when someone says faster confirmations means a weak currency, please back it up. The speed of hashes in bitcoin will be progressively faster as more ASICS come through. Does that mean bitcoin will be weaker than it was because the blockrate is half of of the target? Seems silly to me.
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