Author: Amir Taaki 2012-04-26 17:59:45
Published on: 2012-04-26T17:59:45+00:00
In an email thread on the Bitcoin-development mailing list from 2012, Peter Todd proposed the idea of using the public nature of the blockchain to create trusted identities. He suggested a method where Alice could establish trust in the identity associated with her bitcoin address by creating a series of transactions with large and equal transaction fees, thereby incurring a cost to herself. This would be a way for Alice to prove to other users that she is trustworthy and won't attempt to double spend. If Alice breaks her promise, Bob can publish her signed transaction proving she's a fraudster, which would destroy the value needed to create her trusted identity.Todd likened this system to a distributed green address system, which would make sybil attacks more difficult, as pretending to be thousands of identities would require a significant amount of coins. Additionally, Todd suggested that this system could be used to create a distributed anonymizer, where Alice could publish her request to anonymize coins, and other trusted identities could make their bids. If Alice accepts a bid from Bob, she will want Bob to send her the anonymized coins prior to her transaction going through, thus breaking the temporal connection between the transactions.The email also discussed the potential implementation of replacement transactions and questioned whether it was part of the spec unimplemented or deprecated at the time. Todd mentioned that CoinLab should publish a cost metric for subverting transactions with 90% probability, which would help everyone understand what that number is. Todd concluded his email by stating that more difficulty shortens the safe time we can transact large volumes in, which is good for the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:09:11.167596+00:00