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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

What is my point exactly? I feel like this should be obvious to anyone that doesn't have a bias towards crypto because they are gambling a lot of money on it.

Making confirmations faster usually just tends to make them weaker. The security of each confirmation is based on the work down (or cpu hours). By making confirmations take half the amount of time, this only makes confirmations half as secure, because the amount of CPU hours spent is the same. You can also make confirmations faster by shrinking the amount of work done per block. This means that while confirmations are faster, it will also take longer for your transaction to get into a block in the first place.

Take a look at this and notice how coinbase requires over 10x more confirmations for ethereum than bitcoin.

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593...

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Here's why GHOST supports shorter block times for the same security.

In Bitcoin, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower in the linear chain behind it. Abandoned forks contribute nothing to that.

With GHOST, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower descended from it, in all forks. This way all the forks contribute to a block's security.

With a linear chain, propagation time is an issue. If blocks are too short it's more likely that miners will find more than one candidate block, causing the work on abandoned blocks to be wasted. With GHOST, no work is wasted.

The original GHOST paper, which proposed the algorithm as a modification to Bitcoin, has some math to calculate, for a given propagation time, the block time that would produce equivalent security to a linear chain. It was significantly shorter.

As far as I can tell, GHOST is only used to mitigate high hash power loss when confirmation times are lowered to 15 seconds.

Orphaned blocks are very rare in Bitcoin.

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks?offset=0

Even if you somehow saved all this wasted hash power, you would only maybe increase hash power by less than 1%!!!

Read my comment here for more details.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550997

Sounds like we vehemently agree. Orphaned blocks are indeed rare in Bitcoin, because they have ten-minute block times. GHOST only helps when block times are so short that you get lots of orphaned blocks.

And that's how Ethereum gets away with 15-second blocks.

But you haven't proven that 1 ETH 15 second block is equal or even in the same ballpark in security to a 10 minute BTC block.

The number of confirmations needed to feel like a tx is secure and the throughput of the network are not related. Regardless of that, you're still wrong about security and confirmations, using your own source.

ETH ave. block time: 10s. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (35): ~350s

BTC ave. block time: 10m. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (3): ~1800s

So I can make 5-6 transactions that coinbase thinks is "secure enough" on Ethereum in the time it would take me to make one transaction with Bitcoin.

Add to that the fact that the throughput of the network is higher, and ETH is actually about 17x faster than BTC, and that's totally ignoring the on-chain scaling that ETH is much closer to than BTC.

Also I don't currently hold any crypto, so you can stop pretending that everyone who is more informed than you is actually just biased. I cashed (of my mostly BTC holdings) in 2017.

Um no.

I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower.

A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add.

These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security.

https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance...

https://howmanyconfs.com/

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