Bitcoin’s blockchain rewrite time reaches all-time high

[Magician]

Bitcoin [BTC]’s resurgence on the cryptocurrency charts also caused a change in other factors including mining characteristics and adoption rates. In a recent tweet, Jameson Lopp, the CTO of CasaHODL and creator of satoshi.info stated:

“The amount of time it would take for an attacker with 100% of the Bitcoin network hashrate to rewrite the entire blockchain has reached an all-time high of over 400 days.”

Source: Twitter

This data was calculated by dividing the cumulative chain work by the estimate of hashrate at the time. Some users in the Bitcoin ecosystem had their own concerns about that data, with Satoshi Disciple, a Bitcoin enthusiast asking:

“Jameson, it is not clear how is this calculated? If anyone runs this much hashrate, won’t difficulty be different (i.e. much higher) on that chain to force the blocks being produced every 10 minutes.”

To this question, Lopp responded that for the attack mentioned by the user the attacker would be mining a completely different chain in private and can only publish the blocks once their chain achieved a greater cumulative proof of work than the main network. Other users also had the doubts of why the metric wasn’t always going up as there was more cumulative work being added every day. To this, Lopp responded:

“Yes, but this metric is cumulative work divided by current hashrate, so the derivative of the current hashrate will be the main factor.”

At the moment of writing, Bitcoin’s mempool size was quite low after the numbers spiked on June 7. The mempool size is the aggregate size of the transactions waiting to be confirmed, which at press time was 2.224 million bytes. Jameson Lopp was also in the news recently when he discussed the topic of governance in the Bitcoin ecosystem and who actually controlled the Bitcoin core. Lopp had mentioned one of his own articles which said:

“While there are a handful of GitHub “maintainer” accounts at the organization level that have the ability to merge code into the master branch, this is more of a janitorial function than a position of power. If anyone could merge into master it would very quickly turn into a “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario. Bitcoin Core follows principles of least privilege that any power bestowed to individuals is easily subverted if it is abused.”

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