Author: Peter Vessenes 2012-04-26 17:11:51
Published on: 2012-04-26T17:11:51+00:00
In an email thread on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Peter Todd discusses the idea of using the public nature of the blockchain to create trusted identities for financial transactions. He suggests that if someone wants to establish trust in the "identity" associated with a specific bitcoin address, they can do so by valuing that identity and deliberately throwing away resources, such as by transferring coins to a null address or creating a series of transactions with large, equal transaction fees. This creates a distributed green address system that allows other users to decide to accept zero-confirmation transactions at face value. If someone breaks that promise, their signed transaction can be published, destroying the value needed to create their trusted identity. Todd notes that this system could be used beyond fast payments, such as in a distributed anonymizer where bids from trusted identities are accepted. He also suggests that this makes sybil attacks more difficult and could be applied to other systems like Tor nodes. In a separate part of the email thread, Todd requests information from the core team about replacement transactions and the ability to replace transactions within the current implementation or if it's unimplemented or deprecated.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:08:08.442278+00:00