Talk:Thin Client Security

Lapp0, please stop deleting my content, which has been on this wiki page for over three years now. If you think it's suddenly no longer true, discuss here first. In particular, you wrote:

  Transactions don't become more valid with more block preceding it's proof.

Chains become more trustworthy as they become (difficultywise-)longer. This is the most basic principle of blockchain consensus.

I have to keep putting that "(difficultywise-)" in there so pedantic people don't pounce on me... a 100,000-block chain all at difficulty=1 is "difficultywise-shorter" than a 100-block chain at current difficulty levels (or a one-block chain for that matter). It's not the number of blocks, but their total difficulty.

You also wrote:

 The vagueness of what Full-chain is should be elaborated on probably explaining it uses SPV proofs

No, full-chain clients such as the Satoshi client do not use SPV in any way, shape, or form. A full-chain client is a client that implements the main algorithm outlined in Satoshi's whitepaper.

Eldentyrell (talk) 03:05, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

This page looks very confused/wrong in many respects. I'm not sure how it can be fixed easily, since it is unclear what exactly it intends to say.

• Generally "thin clients" do not include pruned full nodes, which have processed every block, but afterward discarded (and no longer store) them.
• Even thin clients generally verify block heights as well as depth.
• Thin clients never (neither for height nor depth) check blocks are valid ("well-formed"?). This is the fundamental difference between full nodes vs thin clients.
• Transaction validity is independent of its inclusion in any blockchain.

--Luke-jr (talk) 07:58, 26 February 2015 (UTC)