It's a matter of security. Keeping previous history on the blockchain makes it much more difficult to fork and overwrite blocks to create a double spend. Think of each block as a layer of sediment on the ocean floor. The deeper the sediment, the more likely it is to be undisturbed history and therefore accurate. Six blocks is considered irreversible on the bitcoin blockchain.
However, the early implementation of bitcoin wasn't focused so much on privacy. It would be possible to use Merkle proofs to shorthand history and use the hashes of these instead to ensure tamper proof history. Some blockchains are being planned that will have fully encrypted privacy features (ZK-Snarks, Schnorr sigs, etc).
How do previous histories add security if there has to be a big enough majority about current states in particular?
How does it make double spend more difficult?
If a big enough majority is corrupt, it can be corrupt enough to forge entire histories if it deems necessary.
If a big enough majority can fake 4 bytes, why can not it fake 1024 bytes?
I am not convinced myself on which is more important: privacy or transparency.
I am convinced that efficiency is more important than both, and it should be the deciding factor.
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The hash power to do this would cost more than the payouts would be worth. This means that the only potential motivation to do this is to crash the network. A state actor with quantum computing capability might attempt this in the future if possible, but keep in mind that quantum resistant algorithms can be put in place very quickly by changing the number of zeros in front of the nonce.
In order for a fork to succeed and double spend, it has to rehash all the way back to the point it wants to overwrite and maintain that fork against all the other nodes in the system. If one simply submits invalid transactions to the network and does it consistently, the other nodes will censor that cheating node and be blacklisted.
There's a series of rules for submitting transactions to the mempool, any one of which if returning false indicates an invalid transaction. Long histories help prevent this because if a hash changes in any of the Merkle trees whatsoever, we know tampering has happened and it will invalidate everything after that point in the chain. Other nodes detecting such tampering would simply upload their own copies of the chain to the network to correct it.
That said, Satoshi was blockchain 1.0. There's ways to improve privacy.
I have to learn to get to your level of comprehension of POW, but you also assume that POW is how currencies should be managed, and as you know there are rivaling strategies.
I consider Bitcoin inferior and obsolete.
I do not deny its evident value, but I hope it will crash, and not in order for me to buy it at a lower price, but because of its waste of energy and initial distribution.
My bigger problem is why even Byteball, a far more advanced currency, repeat this same waste.
My main concern if efficiency.
Privacy contradicts with transparency, and I try to avoid thinking about which is more important and if and how they can be combined.
I don't recall saying that anywhere. EOS has solved the scaling issue better than bitcoin and ethereum, but does sacrifice some security and decentralization to do so. Each blockchain has its different uses.
I did not try to ask about the whole scaling issue.
I only asked about storage of entire histories.
And it may not be only a POW issue, because Byteball has it too.
It might have a good reason that still evades me.
I ask because I want to know if it exists and if it does, then what is it?
Study how the hashes of each block link the blocks together in a chain. This is in Andreas Antonopoulos's book "Mastering Bitcoin" on github. It's not impossible to change these things, but a hard fork would be necessary and that's potentially dangerous to the ecosystem.
Does it apply to Byteball?
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