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7 votes
Accepted

How does Proof of Burn work?

Attention: Ambiguity! Note that the term (or abbreviation) "PoB" can be used differently. For example, some cryptocurrencies allow users to get some of their coins for provably burning money in ...
UTF-8's user avatar
  • 3,244
5 votes
Accepted

Can I rely on multisignature addresses being future proof?

Multisig transaction types use standard CHECKMULTISIG opcodes (which have been present in Bitcoin since its initial release in January 2009) and P2SH addresses (standardized in BIP13 in October 2011). ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
4 votes

Is it possible to have a modified Proof of Work that does not require as much energy to secure the blockchain?

No, because by design PoW is assigning relevance proportional to power usage. If the market pays N USD per day worth of BTC to miners (in subsidy + fees combined), then the mining ecosystem will ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
4 votes
Accepted

What are the upcoming scaling and privacy improvements for Bitcoin past 2021?

Given Taproot is a soft fork and a consensus change I will assume you are interested in consensus changes rather than non-consensus changes. There are incremental privacy improvements being worked on ...
Michael Folkson's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

If the longest chain is considered the valid blockchain by nodes, what happens if a future supercomputer alters the entire blockchain?

Yes, it is a fundamental security assumption that the majority of the hashrate on the network is honest, where honest means "not collaborating to attack". Assuming an antagonist with ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 77.9k
3 votes

Is it possible to have a modified Proof of Work that does not require as much energy to secure the blockchain?

The security of the Bitcoin network is dependant on the financial incentives built into mining. This means that the amount of energy used to secure the network is not really important, it is the cost ...
chytrik's user avatar
  • 18.4k
3 votes

How does Proof of Burn work?

With proof of burn, instead of pouring money into expensive computer equipment, you 'burn' coins by sending them to an address where they are irretrievable. By committing your coins to never-never ...
user57175's user avatar
3 votes

How does Proof of Burn work?

Think of the burning Bitcoin to create XCP in such a way: You take $1,000 of 20 dollar bill to the US Treasury Department, and US Treasury Department burns it, and mints 250 notes of 4 dollar bills ...
Lenard's user avatar
  • 31
2 votes

How to determine if a cryptocurrency has a promising future?

Whenever I am looking into an ICO, there are some things I generally take into consideration. 1. Team -Make sure the team is real, and verifiable. Check linkedin, or other sites to verify the teams ...
DjangoBlockchain's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Will the Bitcoin Network Security decrease after the last Bitcoin was mined?

Off-chain protocols like Lightning and sidechains can offer instant settlement but they come with their own set of trade-offs. Lightning requires you to be online 24/7 to monitor the chain and the ...
Michael Folkson's user avatar
2 votes

What can an attacker who controls majority or all of the full nodes do?

Here is an additional answer about what you can do if you control all fully validating nodes (but not necessarily all nodes that don't validate): Anything Bitcoin's security rests on auditing by ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
1 vote

Bitcoin is attacked by China miners by screwing with the network, what will Bitcoin do?

One may speculate on this, but this was already taken into account in the design of Bitcoin. Essentially an attacker would not choose to attack the network because it would hurt their own investment. ...
JBaczuk's user avatar
  • 7,428
1 vote

What can an attacker who controls majority or all of the full nodes do?

Assuming that you have majority control of full nodes and no control of mining. Here are few attacks that can be done: Double spend even after confirmation: Don't relay the blocks that build upon the ...
dark knight's user avatar
  • 2,017
1 vote

What happens if 1-way functions no longer exist?

Luckily, reverting the one-way-ness of cryptographic hash functions is not a mathematical problem. Rather, cryptographic hash functions destroy part of the information by projecting from an infinite ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 77.9k
1 vote

What happens if 1-way functions no longer exist?

without modifications the current bitcoin system would simply be compromised. it seems very likely all private-public key cryptography would be compromised as well, and society as we know it would ...
Jonathan Silverblood's user avatar
1 vote

What can an attacker who controls majority or all of the full nodes do?

During the moment of control, they can do at least the following: relay transactions selectively. this means they can choose to not relay transactions which are valid and therefor censor users of the ...
Jonathan Silverblood's user avatar

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