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by clolege 1668 days ago
> I think this is where you get the problem - if you just have two sets of signatures, how do you tell which is legitimate and which one isn't? How do you conclude in which set the cabal was lying?

I feel like you should be able to deduce it from the distribution of participation after the fork, right?

The “fake” chain would lose all honest verifiers (and all transactions from honest wallets?) which seems like it would be pretty detectable with simple statistical analysis. Staked nodes not participating (and active wallets not transacting) becomes less and less likely the longer the post-fork chain is.

2 comments

> The “fake” chain would lose all honest verifiers (and all transactions from honest wallets?) which seems like it would be pretty detectable with simple statistical analysis. Staked nodes not participating (and active wallets not transacting) becomes less and less likely the longer the post-fork chain is.

But you don't know who's honest - you may as well be saying the real chain lost all the dishonest verifiers.

Exactly - that's where statistical analysis (like fakespot) comes in.

For each chain you'd be able to look at the age, stake & historical participation level of the post-fork participants and get a pretty good idea which (if either) of the chains is real. The absence of honest participants should look a lot different than the absence of dishonest ones.

Granted, this method is not nearly as simple as checking the number of 0s on a hash, but I would imagine it to be quite difficult to circumvent.

How do you know what are honest verifiers and wallets?
You any specific verifier/wallet, you won't - but the fake chain will have 0 uncompromised actors after the fork.

Which means that large stakeholders suddenly stop verifying blocks. Long-term active wallets stop transacting.

The same might be true for both chains after the fork, but I would imagine the fake one would have a larger change in participation (weighting older wallets and larger stakes) than the real one.