Are blockchains truly distributed systems?

[BlackHatCoiner]

You just must trust HONEST miners - as described in the initial financial term sheet of Bitcoin - read the White Paper - that is binding, only.

Yes, network is secure as long as honest miners control most CPU power of the network. You say that you have to trust honest miners, that's not necessarily true. You would have to trust them if they would "carry" your money, but they're not banks. You trust them your transaction's confirmation, but even if someone had the power to reverse your transaction that is more than 6 blocks deep, he wouldn't use it to reverse anything. He would use it to generate new blocks, because it would be more profitable.

[hv_]

Where is the trust then ? Why would that very cartel do sth 'bad' ? Could that 'hide' ?

As a simple example. Then Bitmain/Jihan Wu and the mining cartel will have a better probability to, increase the block size/remove the limit, remove the Core developers, even if if the users/community do not want both.

Plus if no one ran full nodes, you want the users to trust the miners?

You just must trust HONEST miners - as described in the initial financial term sheet of Bitcoin - read the White Paper - that is binding, only.

But trust who? WHO ARE THE HONEST MINERS?

Bitcoin is robust because it was designed to assume that EVERYONE can become a BAD ACTOR against the network.

really everyone ?

Why long term investing miners ? Big enough to really do sth bad ?

Bitcoin is perfectly done, including its implemented game theory

Miners are the makers - for the incentives - long term

everyone else just cannot do any harm, even 1000s of following Sybil nodes, cause they can only update what miners make or be out of sync - do harm for other Sybils

so better have only few powerful ones those to get paid for stay honest

[DooMAD]

You just must trust HONEST miners - as described in the initial financial term sheet of Bitcoin - read the White Paper - that is binding, only.

But trust who? WHO ARE THE HONEST MINERS?

Bitcoin is robust because it was designed to assume that EVERYONE can become a BAD ACTOR against the network.

really everyone ?

Why long term investing miners ? Big enough to really do sth bad ?

Bitcoin is perfectly done, including its implemented game theory

Miners are the makers - for the incentives - long term

everyone else just cannot do any harm, even 1000s of following Sybil nodes, cause they can only update what miners make or be out of sync - do harm for other Sybils

so better have only few powerful ones those to get paid for stay honest

You don't appear to grasp the concept behind the alignment of incentives.  Any given blockchain should offer greater benefit in securing the chain than it does to cheat.  Coins which get the balance wrong have already been attacked.  See your cousin forkcoin, BTG, as an example.  They suffered a hashrate attack because they failed to maintain the incentive to remain honest.  Part of that largely unseen equation comes from the cost of sustaining such an attack for a prolonged period.  

You can see the cost of maintaining a hashrate attack for a few coins here.   Of the SHA256 coins that are listed, you might notice yours is the cheapest to attack.  You can keep relying on trust and fanciful notions such as "honest miners" , like someone who is totally ignorant of the consequences, but we're not doing that.

You need to stop pretending you can come in here and lecture us because you've been duped by a second-rate copy of a white paper.  All you have are wild theories and gross misconceptions.  You clearly don't understand how any of this works in practice.  Nor does Faketoshi for that matter.  If you're going to be a mouthpiece for someone, at least make sure they're not a technologically-illiterate clown.

[pooya87]

See your cousin forkcoin, BTG, as an example.  They suffered a hashrate attack because they failed to maintain the incentive to remain honest.

why go that far, the bcashsv's parent shitcoin called bcash was also 51% attacked last year in May because it is centralized and one mining cartel controls more than 90% of its hashrate.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack

[Wind_FURY]

Where is the trust then ? Why would that very cartel do sth 'bad' ? Could that 'hide' ?

As a simple example. Then Bitmain/Jihan Wu and the mining cartel will have a better probability to, increase the block size/remove the limit, remove the Core developers, even if if the users/community do not want both.

Plus if no one ran full nodes, you want the users to trust the miners?

You just must trust HONEST miners - as described in the initial financial term sheet of Bitcoin - read the White Paper - that is binding, only.

But trust who? WHO ARE THE HONEST MINERS?

Bitcoin is robust because it was designed to assume that EVERYONE can become a BAD ACTOR against the network.

really everyone ?

Why long term investing miners ? Big enough to really do sth bad ?

Who's good to you, would not be good to me. Who's good for Core, would not be good for the big blockers. Who's good to Faketoshi Wright, would definitely good for Roger Ver.

Should we trust the miners to hard fork to Bitcoin Unlimited evsn though there's a technical debate that it's bad for the network? What would happen if the mining cartel was co-opted by the Chinese government? What would be the last line of defense to secure Bitcoin? FULL NODES.

[DooMAD]

See your cousin forkcoin, BTG, as an example.  They suffered a hashrate attack because they failed to maintain the incentive to remain honest.

why go that far, the bcashsv's parent shitcoin called bcash was also 51% attacked last year in May because it is centralized and one mining cartel controls more than 90% of its hashrate.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack

True enough.  My recollection is somehow more vivid for the BTG one.  I had a vague memory it happened to BCH as well, but wasn't 100% sure.  BCH is definitely a much better comparison, though, since the estimated cost of attack is very similar to BSV.  Arguably, it's only a matter of time before someone decides the "vision" isn't panning out and does something naughty.  That said, would any BSV users even notice if their chain got attacked?  They all seem to be too blinded by fiction to see clearly.   

[Wind_FURY]

See your cousin forkcoin, BTG, as an example.  They suffered a hashrate attack because they failed to maintain the incentive to remain honest.

why go that far, the bcashsv's parent shitcoin called bcash was also 51% attacked last year in May because it is centralized and one mining cartel controls more than 90% of its hashrate.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack

True enough.  My recollection is somehow more vivid for the BTG one.  I had a vague memory it happened to BCH as well, but wasn't 100% sure.  BCH is definitely a much better comparison, though, since the estimated cost of attack is very similar to BSV.  Arguably, it's only a matter of time before someone decides the "vision" isn't panning out and does something naughty.  That said, would any BSV users even notice if their chain got attacked?  They all seem to be too blinded by fiction to see clearly.   

They're not blinded. They are scamming, and shilling "Satoshi's Vision" and then try to get what they actually want from you. Your Bitcoin in exchange for their shitcoin.

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

[DooMAD]

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

I kinda see what you're getting at.  But if you are syncing a full node for the first time, you don't need to place trust in any particular node or miner in order to obtain your copy of the blockchain.  Whichever source your client connects to and starts pulling data from, you know it's going to be the same information everyone else has, because that source would be forked off the network if they attempted to alter the data in their copy of the blockchain.  So in that sense, is it not a distributed system?  Just because your client is checking the information it receives to ensure it conforms to certain rules, that doesn't mean your node can operate entirely on its own.  It needs to connect to a network of other peers in order to function.

If you went down a different route and remotely downloaded a copy of the blockchain as a compressed file via torrent or some other means, then there is always the potential that, while your node might not find any data in that copy of the blockchain that breaks any validation rules, if someone has tampered with or falsified a transaction in that version you've downloaded, then you won't sync with the correct network.  Verification alone is not always sufficient to guarantee consensus.

[odolvlobo]

I would avoid applying ideas of morality to the words "honest" and "attack". Morality does not apply here.

I also would like to point out that we have seen many examples showing that a "51% attack" is not necessarily fatal. That means that Bitcoin is much more susceptible to a 51% attack than people believe because the idea that the attacker loses everything is simply not true.

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

That's because you consider a system to be either distributed or not distributed, with nothing in between. I don't think any system could be considered distributed by your criteria.

[pooya87]

Whichever source your client connects to and starts pulling data from, you know it's going to be the same information everyone else has, because that source would be forked off the network if they attempted to alter the data in their copy of the blockchain.

you don't know this and the node you connect to could actually be on a fake fork. in fact this is a known attack vector.
it is trivial to mine a huge number of blocks on top of genesis block in this day and age with a single ASIC since the difficulty was the minimum. so if you simply trust the first node you connect to and start downloading blocks from it you could waste your time and traffic by downloading a ton of data (the fake blocks could be big too) until at some point your node realizes it is on a fork and has to re-download everything from block 1.
this was mitigated by introduction of headers-first IBD in bitcoin core 0.10

[Wind_FURY]

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

That's because you consider a system to be either distributed or not distributed, with nothing in between. I don't think any system could be considered distributed by your criteria.

It wasn't "my criteria". It's about what Bitcoin/blockchain networks are. That each node in the network re-validates and re-processes everyone's transactions.

[hv_]

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

That's because you consider a system to be either distributed or not distributed, with nothing in between. I don't think any system could be considered distributed by your criteria.

It wasn't "my criteria". It's about what Bitcoin/blockchain networks are. That each node in the network re-validates and re-processes everyone's transactions.

Again, all the non-mining nodes do no processing here, they relay / route at best. Compare as open banking api clients, consuming what banks / payment processors create ( mine ) for them. With those consuming clients you might just be out of sync with the mining network if you store some account data and find out later in the process, that sth went 'wrong' with what the mining processors produced for you ( new block / new longer chain / rewrite a lot what consumer nodes have stored before). But nothing you can do here, except try to mine a correct block on top and claim that your process chain is the correct one.

So only miners keep it up and running

Like banks/ swift/ ach network.

Those are the processors, the trusted parties.


Your home non mining hobby node does nothing in terms of trust
Huge processors wont never ever trust those data, they run bigger ones, higher connected (to other strong miners prior), fast and expensive - cause their profits depend on that


The world is not equal, esp when there is profit. PoW is such

[Wind_FURY]

But let's be on topic. Blockchains are NOT distributed systems. I haven't seen a post that tells me I'm wrong.

That's because you consider a system to be either distributed or not distributed, with nothing in between. I don't think any system could be considered distributed by your criteria.

It wasn't "my criteria". It's about what Bitcoin/blockchain networks are. That each node in the network re-validates and re-processes everyone's transactions.

Again, all the non-mining nodes do no processing here, they relay / route at best.

--snipped--

Stopped you there.

Of course non-mining full nodes process/validate. They validate that everything is in order/follows the rules BEFORE propagating/relaying.

Some miners don't even run their own nodes. Are you saying they don't process/validate?

[DooMAD]

It wasn't "my criteria". It's about what Bitcoin/blockchain networks are. That each node in the network re-validates and re-processes everyone's transactions.

Again, all the non-mining nodes do no processing here, they relay / route at best.

--snipped--

Stopped you there.

Of course non-mining full nodes process/validate. They validate that everything is in order/follows the rules BEFORE propagating/relaying.

Some miners don't even run their own nodes. Are you saying they don't process/validate?

I honestly can't tell if hv_ is simply ignorant or just trolling at this point.  This is basic stuff that anyone who has been around for more than 5 minutes should be able to understand.  The whole idea of running a full node is that you don't rely on trusting others like SPV users do.  If full node software wasn't validating the info it is receiving, you would have to blindly trust that it was correct.  Maybe that's how faketoshi vision works, heh.

And as the popular idiom around here goes: "Don't trust.  Verify."

[pooya87]

I honestly can't tell if hv_ is simply ignorant or just trolling at this point.

it is neither, they (and by them i mean all the idiots following Craig Scammer Wright) are trying to convince people with a dishonest narrative that users not only don't need to but also they shouldn't run full nodes. basically it tells them that they should rely on centralized services only.
the purpose is to justify the ridiculous block size of bcashsv (2GB) that is a fundamental flaw, and prevent any argument against it such as "users can't run full nodes if blocks were that big" before it starts.