Mutability of Private Blockchain

+1 vote

Paul Chou CEO of Xledger says  “It is very easy to mutate a private chain that has no proof-of-work invested,” says Chou. “That’s my biggest disagreement. In theory, anything is mutable; it’s just a question of difficulty.”

in http://www.waterstechnology.com/waters/feature/2432864/off-the-chain-the-blockchain-battle?utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=Off%20the%20Chain%3A%20The%20Blockchain%20Battle&utm_campaign=WT.SST_Weekly_RL.EU.A.U&utm_source=WT.DCM.Editors_Updates&im_mfcid=889a25e5bc1fb928a504d04a926939e5

How does this compare to Multichain and round-robin approach?

 

asked Nov 5, 2015 by senthil

1 Answer

0 votes

Both public and private blockchains run the risk of being mutated, i.e. retroactively changed. They just use a different security model for preventing a minority of participants from doing this.

To mutate a public blockchain based on proof of work, there needs to be malicious collusion between the parties who collectively own 51% of the mining capacity of that chain.

To mutate a private blockchain based on round-robin distributed consensus with a mining diversity 0 ≤ d ≤ 1 and m > 0 permitted miners, there needs to be malicious collusion between at least m × d of those permitted miners.

These two risks can't really be quantitatively compared, because they are different types of risk.

Libertarians can live with the 51% proof of work risk, but not the round-robin one, because they don't want to be dependent on any kind of centralized or authoritarian structure.

Enterprises who have signed contracts regarding a blockchain they use collectively can live with the round-robin one, but not with being dependent on anonymous proof-of-work mining, because they have the court system as recourse.

answered Nov 5, 2015 by MultiChain
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