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The effect of block arrival time and average block interval on blockchain forking and resolution

Started by Bitcoin, Mar 23, 2022, 04:13 am

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Bitcoin

The effect of block arrival time and average block interval on blockchain forking and resolution

Solana docs say:



In Proof of Work consensus, these block times need to be very large
(~10 minutes) to minimize the odds of multiple validators producing a
new valid block at the same time. There's no such constraint in Proof
of Stake consensus, but without reliable timestamps, a validator
cannot determine the order of incoming blocks. The popular workaround
is to tag each block with a wallclock timestamp. Because of clock
drift and variance in network latencies, the timestamp is only
accurate within an hour or two.  To workaround the workaround, these systems lengthen block times to provide reasonable certainty that the median timestamp on each block is always increasing.



My assessment:


Let's quickly discuss BTC's proof of work. Block time is 10m, and it's mostly this much so that two blocks can not be solved at the same time. Even that, there's still a chance this could happen, if so, one of the blocks will be discarded and another one will be added. Now, chance is nodes don't know which block they should add to their chain, but I guess, whichever gets propagated first to them, they add that. Le's say in Bitcoin, 3 blocks were mined at the same time.


Some call this a huge problem that when node receives 2 blocks at the same time, it doesn't know which one was solved first and one block gets discarded while there's a chance that second one should have gotten discarded.  So it turns out timestamp is used only for managing/calculating difficulty.


Am I right what I assessed and what Solana describes as a problem above ?


Source: The effect of block arrival time and average block interval on blockchain forking and resolution