Author: Christophe Biocca 2014-04-23 12:43:56
Published on: 2014-04-23T12:43:56+00:00
Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin developer, discusses the concept of Finney attacks in a mailing list. These attacks occur when miners secretly work on blocks containing a double spend, which is where purchases are made with a modified wallet that always submits a double spend to a service. N% of the time, users get their money back minus the miner's fee. The idea of discouraging blocks that perform Finney attacks by having honest miners refuse to build on them has been proposed but has some flaws. Dishonest blocks can be identified out of band by having honest miners submit double spends against themselves to the service anonymously using a separate tool. Miners can vote to reallocate the coinbase value of bad blocks before they mature. If a majority of blocks leading up to maturity vote for reallocation, the value goes into a pot that subsequent blocks are allowed to claim for themselves. This introduces no new security assumptions and relies on smart incentives to prevent the traditional reliance on law and regulation to avoid trashing the commons. The identification of Finney blocks relies on miners taking explicit action by downloading and running a tool that submits votes via RPC.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:56:54.567274+00:00