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Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

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Re: Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

#41
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your method is easily exploited by a malicious miner. Clocks across the network are going to have some inherent amount of skew. By forcing blocks to have incrementing timestamps and also by refusing to accept blocks in the future, you have made it easy for me as a miner to commit abuse. Instead of picking the exact current time, I will pick a time that is as far in the future as the network allows (taking full advant…

Yes, if the next block by an honest miner is very quick it will pick a timestamp of (wrong_timestamp + 1) instead of the actual time, but after a few blocks they will certainly able to use the correct time again. But even if all miners decide to do as you say and always pick a date slightly in the future but inside the wiggle room, all that they achieve is a one-time very slight difficulty decrease, but by the next d…

It significantly increases the risk of network forks for people who don't have completely correct clocks. If a merchant has a clock that is off by 1 hour (they didn't adjust properly for daylight savings perhaps, or maybe they just have a really crappy clock), then it's possible they will not even be seeing the most recent 6 blocks, as all of them are 2 hours in the future (3 hours as seen by the merchant).

There are consequences to having blocks that are permanently set forwards beyond a one-time difficulty decrease of 0.6%.

Re: Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

#42
post #31

There should be one of those awesome-* Github repos with a list of lightweight, readable implementations of various protocols/technologies.

I just created it: https://github.com/jchampemont/awesome-implementations If it gets important enough, I'll send it to the awesome list repository. Feel free to contribute guys!

Nice. Maybe kilo? https://github.com/antirez/kilo

Re: Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

#43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just created it: https://github.com/jchampemont/awesome-implementations If it gets important enough, I'll send it to the awesome list repository. Feel free to contribute guys!

Nice. Maybe kilo? https://github.com/antirez/kilo

Nice suggestion, adding it :)

Re: Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

#44
post #16

I'm also working on my own cryptocurrency implementation forked from known basiccoin of Zack Hess. Simply I'm trying to make the code more readable, fix bugs and provide better API. Currently I do not have a fine README that explains my intentions but going through the whole code and rewriting most parts made me realize how simple actually blockchain is. Thinking about fine details like how synchronization of blockch…

I will take a look and would you be willing to answer noob kind of questions?

Re: Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the top (say, three) things you'd like to learn from such a book? I agree, insides on the Ethereum tech (like how their proof of work relates to smart contract state, where the DAG fits in) are very brief / difficult to digest at some points. Ethereum is elegant in many ways - for example, strengthening security by rewarding the linking of orphan blocks in the network. I think there's a need for some better…

I think it should assume the reader is fairly educated on what Bitcoin is, as most newcomers to Ethereum are probably coming from the Bitcoin space, and then differentiating the two coins. - What makes it potentially more powerful than Bitcoin? - What are Ethereum Dapps/smart contracts good for and what are they not good for? There are definitely limitations to coding apps on a distributed network where every node ha…

Yeah I get you. Because Ethereum has such an enterprise-facing governance (eg. Ethereum Enterprise Alliance) most of the education that goes into it is to business and big corps right now.

Do you mind if I get your email and send you something? Looking at writing about this and would love some feedback.

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