Also, how much does Burst have to worry about 'Nothing at Stake'? Basically you can try to mine on every fork you see? If someone gets over 50% of the storage, then he can create a separate fork with very little effort that looks correct? There is one way to sort of get around this but it can't be used to prevent new miners joining the network from joining the wrong fork. So, theoretically, given what is currently implemented.
It is no different than any other algorithm that has 50% value to determine the correct fork. If you own >50% of the Network power (or storage here), you can mine your own fork and publish it once it's ahead of the other fork. Nothing can prevent this in a decentralized system of this kind where the "majority" is right.
The issue is let's say someone started working on a Proof of Work fork. If they wanted to fake a fork that was 100 blocks long, they would have to remove 50% of the mining power from the main chain to create this fork, this would take 100 blocks to complete however.. by which point in time the network would be 100 blocks into the future, so they'd constantly be playing catch up.
The question is, can you occasionally say fake a fork like this in say 5 minutes with a large enough percentage of network resources that the network accepts and uses to overwrite the 10 confirmations of a blockchain which cheats the system and overrides that calculation?
You are correct, a fake fork could be constructed in less time catching up to the current time starting from a block farther back than mining the real one took Considering the reading time for many user's plot files, you could probably construct the fake one in about 1.5 minutes/block. In order to achieve at least the same cumulative difficulty without running into the future(which would cause the chain to get rejected), the fake chain would still have to have a higher hashrate than the real one. In the case of semi-honest miners on both chains, catching up would probably be slower, as miners would be reading different data for each chain, so 3 minutes/block for creating a fake chain would be more likely, making catchup still faster, but not by as much.
Thanks for mentioning this, I'll certainly be keeping it in mind.
