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After watching 3b1b's brief primer on blockchains here, I noticed a bit of a "flaw" with blockchains. It isn't really a flaw, but I'm not sure how it is alleviated.

If we have two players, Alice and Bob, who are transacting with one another, each person stores their own copy of the blockchain. This is a given, as blockchains are necessarily decentralized.

But suppose a third party, Charlie, wants to join. But just as he wants to, both Alice and Bob stop transacting for an extended period.

In this case, Charlie cannot create any transaction; he doesn't have the history of the blockchain required to do pretty much anything.

So, he must wait for Alice or Bob to broadcast a new transaction for him to pick it up.

But is there a better way to do this?

Andrew Baker
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Bitcoin has a gossip protocol by which nodes broadcast the state of the blockchain (or updates to it) to each other. Charlie can join the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network and take advantage of the gossip protocol to download a copy of the blockchain.

D.W.
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