What's a "6 re-org"?

acjohnson55 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm a little rusty with the terminology, but in a blockchain, the canonical current block is the one that has the greatest amount of proof of work (I think they call this the heaviest chain). Typically, each new block is the descendant of the most recent block. But it is possible to create a heavier chain from an earlier block. This invalidates any transactions on what was previously known to be the heaviest chain, and is called a reorg.

The farther back, the less likely a reorg is, so to have a reorg that invalidates is blocks is extremely unusual.

If one entity has a majority of the hash power, they gain the ability to try to force reorgs with a likelihood that increases with their advantage in hash power.

I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer.

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creatonez 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer.

Please don't. This would be useless spam, and is completely rude. Do we tell people to "Just google it?" here?

	▲	acjohnson55 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's different in that there's no need to go hunting through search results. This is what Claude responded when I just asked it: https://claude.ai/share/684fa294-ee35-4044-8344-99e1ceb2e643 I don't think that's spam at all, and I don't think I did anything special in my prompt that someone with less background knowledge could have done.

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tromp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

User skarz did indeed ask an LLM, which got [flagged] since the LLM gave a distinctly worse answer. Expand the [9 more] below to see it.

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jmholla 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This was a great answer. I'm glad you spent the time on it. Though I am curious what the 6 indicates.

	▲	ningen_000 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Six blocks

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skarz 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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tromp 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

No, it's not 6 blocks longer. It just needs to be 1 longer (i.e. 7 blocks since the last common block), which guarantees a higher cumulative difficulty and thus all honest miners will switch to the new branch, obsoleting 6 blocks on the old branch.

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skarz 4 days ago | parent [-]

Well, there you have it. GPT-5 failed a basic explanation lol.

	▲	uncircle 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Many such cases

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1270018080 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be impossible to enforce, and a place that HN that has leaders who evangelize AI as a cure-all would never do it, but "I asked AI and here's what it said" comments should be against the rules.

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dragonwriter 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Actually, they shouldn't, because then people will do it without announcing them, and you want them to be open.

They're almost invariably low quality and deserving of downvotes for that reason, but being open is better than them being camouflaged.

	▲	4 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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dotancohen 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why?

Most such comments are actually informative, and the honesty about asking an AI is an important detail. This particular one was heavily downvoted, as it should have been, because it was wrong. It was still a human writing, trying to be helpful.

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dsr_ 4 days ago | parent [-]

You shouldn't downvote entries that are wrong, you should present evidence against them. People shouldn't feel penalized for being wrong, just not rewarded for it.

However, you should downvote for doing things that hurt the community -- and "I asked ChatGPT" hurts the community almost as much as "I googled this for you" does.

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aspenmayer 4 days ago | parent [-]

Downvoted for disagreement and for mentioning voting, but I'm telling you why because you think I ought to say something if I disagree, which I'm able to do in this case.

It's fine to downvote things that you believe are wrong or simply disagree with, and I have read mods on HN say that downvoting for disagreement is okay. Asking or insisting for more from an HN user is presumptuous, and discussion of voting is largely considered off-topic and therefore not really what the guidelines suggests we should do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560543

> Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

More to the upthread point, generated comments are against guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

> HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!

These are quotes from dang, not my own. I'm just a HN user, which is why I found the quotes to help everyone make up their own mind what the guidelines say.

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dsr_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

I note that the body of your comment implicitly agrees with me that providing evidence is a good thing :)

The character of a community is formed by what it does more than what it says it does.

	▲	aspenmayer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would tend to agree that it usually does benefit the discussion to say why one disagrees instead of a simple drive-by downvote, but when folks have already agreed to disagree or are in the process of reaching such agreement, more rabble-rousing inclined folks tend to jump into the fraying thread to sow discord, so I understand why it’s not in the guidelines that we must specify why we downvote or flag instead of just doing so. More from dang on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12334384 The whole comment is worth a read, so here’s just a taste: > Our goal is to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity, which requires a higher signal/noise ratio. Downvotes dampen low-value comments. I know downvotes do bad things too, but that's the good thing they do, and it's big. Taking that away and/or increasing the noise with a flood of people disagreeing about their disagreements would not be an optimization.