Help me NostrGPT? I’ll send you sats ⚡️
I’m trying to orange pill one of my Dad’s friends who’s a brain of Britain barrister 🧠 👨⚖️
Idk how to reply to his message succinctly.
I believe he’s referring to a 51% attack and the longest chain. 
Discussion
How do you know for sure which transaction came first? I can say I saw transaction A before transaction B, and you can accept my word for it, or not. It's an arbitrary decision. The only reliable record of timing is the blockchain itself, and the only way to determine the canonical chain without resorting to a centralized authority is to follow the chain with the most proof of work.
We cannot trust the timestamps put there by miners.
If we could, proof of work is not required at all.
I think he just needs to dive straight in and read Der Gigi’s excellent article / chapter “Bitcoin is time” 🤷♂️
This video helped me understand how Bitcoin works in 2018. I remember I had to watch it several times to get the basics. Perhaps this will bring some more clarity for him.
🙏 Thanks kindly for the sats.
Timestamps are not reliable since they are user reported. This is a well known problem of distributed networks where computers come on and offline and have no reliable way to validate them.
Bitcoin intentionally avoids trusting the timestamps as much as it can, and although they are used in some aspects of the system, they are used in aggregate (using averages) and there are safeguards to avoid calculations being skewed by maliciously reported timestamps.
If someone were to attack the network, they would have to consider the timestamps they use, but considering they report the timestamps themselves, it is not a factor that helps in any way against 51% attacks.
To be clear, there are no timestamps on the transactions themselves, only on the blocks produced by miners.
And no, this wasn't an oversight, this isn't something that we could change that fixes the 51% problem, we haven't been running, testing, critiquing, and attacking bitcoin for 13 years and not thinking about how to improve it.
Question: Since each #Bitcoin transaction includes a timestamp known to all, what practical power would a majority miner even have?
Answer: Mining is how the network determines the ordering of transactions, not by timestamps. A timestamp can be forged trivially (it’s just a number) but producing a block with sufficient Proof-of-Work is costly.
A majority miner has the power to change the order of transactions by producing alternative blocks, enabling the miner to erase previously included transactions from the ledger. This power can be used to defraud recipients or censor transactions arbitrarily.
Fraudulent blocks have to be sustained, that is the fraudster has to keep adding to its fraudulent chain to avoid getting spotted and busted. PoW makes this nearly impossible (unless you have so much hash power that you keep winning the lottery. In 2023? ).
Digging far back, we can find instances of chain being rolled back or patched due to error and/or attacks. But we talking 2013.
Hackers who tried to crack the network for fun and challenge came to this conclusion: Satoshi cannot be a single person. Every bug they wrote (beautiful bugs) not only wouldn’t work but would be greeted by a “well tried” message from satoshi.
If he’s open to watching videos, these are great. I’d recommend starting with this one which talks through a few scenarios including 51% attacks, and there’s other more recent ones about specially a government -based 51% attack (and why that wouldn’t work)