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Let's say I am on a private net, with control over 50% of the hashpower, is there a way to cancel a block ? Could I get rid of a transaction ? If yes, how quickly would this "cancelation" take to propagate. Would it not be best to instead of cancelling a block, write an another block that would invalidate the first one ?
Thanks
Yes, but, I would give some thought to what we're doing and why we're doing it. There's a bit of circular logic here and it runs into conflicting objectives.
In theory, you could rewrite history with a 51% attack against your own chain and that would possibly be relatively easy in a private chain scenario where you control a majority of the miners.
The question that arises is this. If your goal is to reserve for yourself the possible of rewriting history, why use an append-only blockchain? Why not use a database with replicas and overwrite capability? The latter is well-solved and would probably be less trouble. Reserving this re-write capability would bring the authenticity of the private chain into doubt in any case in my opinion .
In other words, in my opinion it's not possible to engineer things such that a rewrite of history is probable and also retain the unique benefits of an immutable blockchain. These are conflicting objectives.
Maybe consider a contract design that can amend stored values in a forward-only auditable way.
Hope it helps.
p.s. It would happen as fast as you can splice a new block at the fork point and your miners a new longest chain.
Let's say you have a 2 node network: Node A mines at 1 Unit/s, and Node B mines at 2 Units/sec.
Node B can always mine more than node A, therefore if B wants to invalidate a block he sync to right before the one he wants to get rid of. B can then mine empty blocks (or mirror the transactions without a particular one they want to erase) until he catches up to A.
The next time B makes a block, Node A will see that there is a longer chain available and switch to B's chain without the transaction in it.
That is what I though, so lets take a scenario of lets say a bank transfer, and the transfert is fraudulent, we therefore want to cancel it. It would be better practice to create a smart contract for the transaction that has a "valid" field and change it to a false, this would therefore invalidate the transaction, rather then completely erasing the said transaction.
Further to the other comments. Yes you can by resetting the latest block to an earlier block and mining from there. However what you have done is create your own fork and all transactions on the original chain will be lost and would need to be replayed.
revert function and correctly permission its use. However, it's kind of missing the 'trustless' philosophy of Ethereum in which a 'proof' architecture is preferred so such revisions aren't necessary. An example is an automated escrow which pays out or reverts based on some future condition or proof.
Apr 14, 2017 at 1:42