What if Bitcoin had 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty retarget

[o_e_l_e_o]

Yes, but in howmanyconfs.com it says that the equivalent time of 6 Bitcoin confirmation blocks would be 375 Litecoin ones, while it should say 24. (1 BTC block = 4 LTC blocks)

howmanyconfs.com also takes account of the different hashrates between different coins, and their different algorithms. Litecoin has 0.381 PH/s at present, whereas Bitcoin has 141,544 PH/s. Litecoin also uses Scrpyt, whereas Bitcoin uses SHA-256. The comparisons it makes are based on the power required for the hashrate being used for the specific alogrithm each coin is using. You can see how it is worked out here: https://github.com/lukechilds/howmanyconfs.com

[1714884723]

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[1714884723]

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[BlackHatCoiner]

howmanyconfs.com also takes account of the different hashrates between different coins, and their different algorithms. Litecoin has 0.381 PH/s at present, whereas Bitcoin has 141,544 PH/s. Litecoin also uses Scrpyt, whereas Bitcoin uses SHA-256. The comparisons it makes are based on the power required for the hashrate being used for the specific alogrithm each coin is using. You can see how it is worked out here: https://github.com/lukechilds/howmanyconfs.com

I may be misunderstanding, but doesn't howmanyconfs.com compare the hash rate based on Bitcoin's work? For example, if the difficulty dropped 50% then wouldn't 6 Bitcoin confirmations be equal with 150 Litecoin ones? If it does, then it only exclude the possibility for an outpace attacker to attack the network. It does not exclude the possibility for the pools' decision. On a completely decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, if one pool gathered the majority of the computational power, it'd be much easier to reverse a transaction 6 blocks deep in contrast with, let's say, Monero, that has a better hashrate distribution.

Shouldn't it compare the distribution too?

[o_e_l_e_o]

For example, if the difficulty dropped 50% then wouldn't 6 Bitcoin confirmations be equal with 150 Litecoin ones?

Sure. If the difficulty dropped by 50% because the hashrate had dropped by 50%, then 6 new confirmations would only require half as much work to reverse than 6 old confirmations.

If it does, then it only exclude the possibility for an outpace attacker to attack the network. It does not exclude the possibility for the pools' decision.

As far as a 51% attack is concerned, the source of the malicious hashrste is irrelevant. If a single entity controls 51% of the hashrate, and can sustain that for long enough, then any number of confirmations can be overturned.

[ranochigo]

I may be misunderstanding, but doesn't howmanyconfs.com compare the hash rate based on Bitcoin's work? For example, if the difficulty dropped 50% then wouldn't 6 Bitcoin confirmations be equal with 150 Litecoin ones? If it does, then it only exclude the possibility for an outpace attacker to attack the network. It does not exclude the possibility for the pools' decision. On a completely decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, if one pool gathered the majority of the computational power, it'd be much easier to reverse a transaction 6 blocks deep in contrast with, let's say, Monero, that has a better hashrate distribution.

Shouldn't it compare the distribution too?

Read the asterisk (https://github.com/lukechilds/howmanyconfs.com/blob/master/README.md#how-are-these-values-calculated). The site measures the work done needed for each confirmation which may or may not correspond to the possibility of a majority attack on the network. It does not outright reflect the security of the network as attacks has to be done with its profitability in mind.

Distribution or rather decentralization is not an accurate way of predicting the possibility of a 51% attack. Any adversary would not openly state that they have the majority of the network's hashrate but would attempt to distribute it in such a way that it is not obvious. Either that or they won't openly state the blocks that they mine. It is wrong to assume that attacks would only be carried out with a singular entity. It can also be done with multiple entities colluding as well.

[todiefor17]

The number of Bitcoins that are constant is 21 million Bitcoins. It takes 6 confirmations per transaction so the block reward and mining difficulty decrease. That is a calculation that I think is reasonable with your conditions. If block times are faster, there will be more transactions and costs can be significantly reduced.

[TangentC]

As far as a 51% attack is concerned, the source of the malicious hashrate is irrelevant.
If a single entity controls 51% of the hashrate, and can sustain that for long enough, then any number of confirmations can be overturned.

Single entity can be a group that colludes for the attack.
As in the 4 pool operators that garner over 51% of the hashrate on a daily basis.

When Satoshi was around he added program coded checkpoints with every software update,
those checkpoints prevented even someone with 99% control from rewriting the blocks before the checkpoint.
Bitcoin Devs that took over after Satoshi, quit adding checkpoints, I believe it interfered in their btc is infallible religious cult.  

But as it stands, no checkpoints have been added to BTC since before segwit, in 2017.
So a rewrite can go back , at least to 2017, if enough computing power was available.
That would be an insanely large amount of Computing Power,
maybe a coordinated attack by quantum computers with a self-aware AI in charge.  

Other coins has installed rolling checkpoints,
which is nothing more than clients refusing reorgs after 1 to 2 days.

That does nothing to interfere with the security of the hashrate or decentralization or any other trigger words for the BTC cultist,  
all it does is guarante that after the rolling checkpoint those prior transactions are forever safe even from a 99% attacker.  
It adds a finality to transactions, that is required to truly be a world currency. IMO.  

But since it interferes with the Bitcoiner cultist beliefs, BTC will never use checkpoints again.  

[Vishnu.Reang]

As far as a 51% attack is concerned, the source of the malicious hashrste is irrelevant. If a single entity controls 51% of the hashrate, and can sustain that for long enough, then any number of confirmations can be overturned.

A few months back, someone actually did a rough calculation on the cost of a 51% attack on Bitcoin. According to his estimate, it will take hardware worth $5.46 billion to start such an attack. Now the question is, can so much of mining hardware be purchased in one go? Now comes the second part. Hardware worth this much amount will require a proportionate amount of electricity, which will be around 125 TWh per hour.  This means that such an attack will be possible only if it is spread across several countries.

[TangentC]

As far as a 51% attack is concerned, the source of the malicious hashrste is irrelevant. If a single entity controls 51% of the hashrate, and can sustain that for long enough, then any number of confirmations can be overturned.

A few months back, someone actually did a rough calculation on the cost of a 51% attack on Bitcoin. According to his estimate, it will take hardware worth $5.46 billion to start such an attack. Now the question is, can so much of mining hardware be purchased in one go? Now comes the second part. Hardware worth this much amount will require a proportionate amount of electricity, which will be around 125 TWh per hour.  This means that such an attack will be possible only if it is spread across several countries.

4 colluding pool operators can do it at zero cost.
As the miners are giving them over 51% control daily.
Would their pools collapse afterwards , yep, but the damage would already be done.
Plus you always have the security risk, that those 4 individuals are coerced against their will by an evil organization or government.

[NeuroticFish]

4 colluding pool operators can do it at zero cost.

If the 51% attack goes through, probably a hard fork will have to be forced and most probably the miners will leave those pools.
This means that the cost is a high risk to go out of business. It doesn't look like zero cost to me.

[TangentC]

4 colluding pool operators can do it at zero cost.

If the 51% attack goes through, probably a hard fork will have to be forced and most probably the miners will leave those pools.
This means that the cost is a high risk to go out of business. It doesn't look like zero cost to me.

Zero up front costs, but going out of business afterwards is a guarantee for those 4.
Which is why the biggest security threat is coercion to those 4 , by outside forces with nothing to lose.
Say, you are a criminal organization and you want to earn guaranteed money by betting against bitcoin in a futures market,
a double-spend would make that happen. And coercion is a normal tactic of your criminal business model.

[NeuroticFish]

coercion is a normal tactic of your criminal business model.

I'm not sure I understand your point, since coercion is normal everywhere against wrongdoers, no matter it's a criminal organization or it's the law structure of a normal country.
I guess that it's only the Bible that tells you to turn the other cheek, everybody else will go from explaining that you did wrong (if you are small child) to some sort of coercion sooner or later.

[TangentC]

coercion is a normal tactic of your criminal business model.

I'm not sure I understand your point, since coercion is normal everywhere against wrongdoers, no matter it's a criminal organization or it's the law structure of a normal country.

Criminal organization use coercion as a means to achieving their goals.
Coercion can be simple blackmail, ie: cheating spouses
or
Coercion can be force, ie: Bodily harm to you or your loved ones.

My point is they already use coercion in their dealings on a daily basis,
if they decided to profit in a bitcoin futures market by causing a double-spend.
They already have the resources and the tactics and the people necessary to coerce the 4 mining pool operators.

In short, making sure that those 4 mining pool operators and their families have around the clock security details is paramount to bitcoin continued security.

[NeuroticFish]

In short, making sure that those 4 mining pool operators and their families have around the clock security details is paramount to bitcoin continued security.

OK, this somewhat makes sense, although I expect that those pools are not operated by single individuals and most of those are anonymous. So it won't be easy to get to them.
And this is the same with any other coin and this also doesn't make Bitcoin less secure, really. Especially as just getting 51% of the hash rate is not enough for an "attack", you have to also do a double spend that worth the hassle. And as I said, if it's the case, a hard fork can "fix" this. It won't be pretty, but it can be done.

[o_e_l_e_o]

When Satoshi was around he added program coded checkpoints with every software update,
those checkpoints prevented even someone with 99% control from rewriting the blocks before the checkpoint.
Bitcoin Devs that took over after Satoshi, quit adding checkpoints, I believe it interfered in their btc is infallible religious cult.  

Except the checkpoints were never intended to prevent chain re-orgs. They were there to prevent an attacker flooding new nodes with low difficulty blocks, not as protection against 51% attacks. And since we now synchronize headers first rather than entire blocks, the checkpoints became unnecessary.

But as it stands, no checkpoints have been added to BTC since before segwit, in 2017.
So a rewrite can go back , at least to 2017, if enough computing power was available.

In which case a checkpoint is useless. It makes no difference if someone can rewrite the history back to 2017 or back to last week. Either way, the security model of bitcoin would be completely broken and bitcoin would be worthless.

Other coins has installed rolling checkpoints,
which is nothing more than clients refusing reorgs after 1 to 2 days.

Which means those coins are insecure. If you have to hard code your security like that, then your security is weak. If the security of your coin depends on a developer implemented checkpoint every hour/day/week/whatever, then your security model is is completely centralized.

[TangentC]

When Satoshi was around he added program coded checkpoints with every software update,
those checkpoints prevented even someone with 99% control from rewriting the blocks before the checkpoint.
Bitcoin Devs that took over after Satoshi, quit adding checkpoints, I believe it interfered in their btc is infallible religious cult.  

Except the checkpoints were never intended to prevent chain re-orgs. They were there to prevent an attacker flooding new nodes with low difficulty blocks, not as protection against 51% attacks. And since we now synchronize headers first rather than entire blocks, the checkpoints became unnecessary.

Feel free to argue with satoshi about it.  
https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-09-13-dont-trust-checkpoint/

Imagine that that Aliens land on earth with a new superfast SHA256 machine. Imagine this machine always gives them more than 51% of the current world Bitcoin hash power (but not enough hash power to completely break SHA256). Suppose they decide to build a chain from the Bitcoin Genesis block that is longer than any other chain on earth and put only empty blocks on it. Could they erase all bitcoin transactions?

Anticipating this type of attack, Satoshi suggested the following security safeguard:

The security safeguard makes it so even if someone does have more than 50% of the network’s CPU power,
they can’t try to go back and redo the block chain before yesterday. (if you have this update)

I’ll probably put a checkpoint in each version from now on.
Once the software has settled what the widely accepted block chain is,
there’s no point in leaving open the unwanted non-zero possibility of revision months later. – Satoshi 2010

* Note : the old satoshi installed checkpoints were never removed from Bitcoin Code,
so their protection is still there even using headersync.

 checkpointData = {
            {
                { 11111, uint256S("0x0000000069e244f73d78e8fd29ba2fd2ed618bd6fa2ee92559f542fdb26e7c1d")},
                { 33333, uint256S("0x000000002dd5588a74784eaa7ab0507a18ad16a236e7b1ce69f00d7ddfb5d0a6")},
                { 74000, uint256S("0x0000000000573993a3c9e41ce34471c079dcf5f52a0e824a81e7f953b8661a20")},
                {105000, uint256S("0x00000000000291ce28027faea320c8d2b054b2e0fe44a773f3eefb151d6bdc97")},
                {134444, uint256S("0x00000000000005b12ffd4cd315cd34ffd4a594f430ac814c91184a0d42d2b0fe")},
                {168000, uint256S("0x000000000000099e61ea72015e79632f216fe6cb33d7899acb35b75c8303b763")},
                {193000, uint256S("0x000000000000059f452a5f7340de6682a977387c17010ff6e6c3bd83ca8b1317")},
                {210000, uint256S("0x000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e")},
                {216116, uint256S("0x00000000000001b4f4b433e81ee46494af945cf96014816a4e2370f11b23df4e")},
                {225430, uint256S("0x00000000000001c108384350f74090433e7fcf79a606b8e797f065b130575932")},
                {250000, uint256S("0x000000000000003887df1f29024b06fc2200b55f8af8f35453d7be294df2d214")},
                {279000, uint256S("0x0000000000000001ae8c72a0b0c301f67e3afca10e819efa9041e458e9bd7e40")},
                {295000, uint256S("0x00000000000000004d9b4ef50f0f9d686fd69db2e03af35a100370c64632a983")},

But as it stands, no checkpoints have been added to BTC since before segwit, in 2017.
So a rewrite can go back , at least to 2017, if enough computing power was available.

In which case a checkpoint is useless. It makes no difference if someone can rewrite the history back to 2017 or back to last week. Either way, the security model of bitcoin would be completely broken and bitcoin would be worthless.

Checkpoints are only useless, if you don't ever use any.  

Other coins has installed rolling checkpoints,
which is nothing more than clients refusing reorgs after 1 to 2 days.

Which means those coins are insecure. If you have to hard code your security like that, then your security is weak. If the security of your coin depends on a developer implemented checkpoint every hour/day/week/whatever, then your security model is is completely centralized.

Nope, rolling checkpoints do nothing to secure transaction after the checkpoint , only before the checkpoint,
reread the quote from satoshi above to help you understand.
It has no effect on the security generated by hashrate or staking, since they should be guaranteeing security for the minimum recommend confirmations, which is usually within 30 minutes to 1 hour.

[o_e_l_e_o]

* Note : the old satoshi installed checkpoints were never removed from Bitcoin Code,
so their protection is still there even using headersync.

They are still there to prevent against the attack I mentioned above:

No, they're still needed to prevent low-difficulty header spam. It's not a particularly strong attack, but without checkpoints it's trivial. The current checkpoints suffice to make it sufficiently expensive.

Checkpoints are only useless, if you don't ever use any.  

And if you do need to use them, your security model is broken. So either useless, or a broken coin. Either way, they add nothing.

[TangentC]

* Note : the old satoshi installed checkpoints were never removed from Bitcoin Code,
so their protection is still there even using headersync.

They are still there to prevent against the attack I mentioned above:

No, they're still needed to prevent low-difficulty header spam. It's not a particularly strong attack, but without checkpoints it's trivial. The current checkpoints suffice to make it sufficiently expensive.

Checkpoints are only useless, if you don't ever use any.  

And if you do need to use them, your security model is broken. So either useless, or a broken coin. Either way, they add nothing.

Again , you are arguing with Satoshi not me,
he thought they had merit so that is why he used them.
IF he had stayed, they would have been added with every update,
unless he moved to a rolling checkpoint , which he probably would have.

if you are so strong on your viewpoints, should you not contact the BTC core devs and have the checkpoints removed,
since according to you they have no value.  
That would embolden your position on checkpoints.

I mean you must be smarter than satoshi, right?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Again , you are arguing with Satoshi not me,
he thought they had merit so that is why he used them.

I think he's arguing with you. Satoshi also set the block size limit to 32MB. What he's trying to tell you is that if your entire money system depends on checkpoints, it's already insecure.

[TangentC]

Again , you are arguing with Satoshi not me,
he thought they had merit so that is why he used them.

I think he's arguing with you. Satoshi also set the block size limit to 32MB. What he's trying to tell you is that if your entire money system depends on checkpoints, it's already insecure.

Well then Bitcoin is insecure, as the old checkpoints were never removed according to your analysis.

When will you two have the checkpoints removed to make bitcoin secure?  

FYI:
With zero checkpoints,
it also opens an improbable but now not impossible task of bitcoin blockchain being rewritten back to the genesis block.
But hey, we don't need no stinkin checkpoints.  

FYI2:
Had the 32mb limit been installed , their would be no need for Offchain nonsense,
their would be zero delays, and the transaction fees could be low.
Shame that one did not get included.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Well then Bitcoin is insecure, as the old checkpoints were never removed according to your analysis.

It's secure as long as the majority of the hash rate isn't owned by an entity that wants to attack the network and that's all it is. If someone gained that much computational power, no checkpoints could secure Bitcoin.