Author: Chris Pacia 2014-04-23 16:19:52
Published on: 2014-04-23T16:19:52+00:00
The proposal suggests a rule which considers blocks with double spends as invalid. If the majority supports this rule, miners wouldn't build on such blocks, just like they wouldn't build on a block with a coinbase over 25 btc. The advantage of this proposal is that it allows for 100 blocks' time for a consensus to be reached, rather than 10 minutes. This allows for human verification/intervention if needed. The original specification of how it's done (redistribution, no cost to voting) seems exploitable, but this can be fixed by reducing the incentive (burning instead of redistributing) and/or adding a risk to the orphaning attempts (a vote that fails destroys X bitcoins' worth from each voting block's own coinbase). This proposal may be used for things other than punishing double-spend pools. It might be used to punish miners for doing anything a significant percentage of hashpower dislikes (large OP_RETURNs, large blocks, gambling transactions, transactions banned by a government). But we can make the threshold higher than 51%, so that this doesn't turn into a significant risk. Non-collusive miners cast votes based on the outcome of their own attempts to double spend. Individually rational strategy is to vote for coinbase reallocation on every block. In practice, that would mean that simple game-theoretic models are no longer applicable, as they lead to absurd results. Miners work to get rewards, and it doesn't matter whether they are deliberately trying to double-spend or not: they won't be able to double-spend without collusion.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:48:12.051914+00:00