Author: Sergio Lerner 2014-04-23 19:33:24
Published on: 2014-04-23T19:33:24+00:00
Sergio D. Lerner, a member of the bitcoin-research list, has joined the bitcoin-development mailing list to be part of the research discussions taking place there. He shared a link to his year-old post about an attack called Bitcoin Eternal Choice for the Dark Side Attack or ECDSA, which erodes confidence in Bitcoin by providing double-spends as a service. Peter Todd's recent post on the issues with BitUndo is related to this. On the bitcoin-development list, Mike Hearn discussed the recent launch of Finney attacks as a service by BitUndo and its implications for Bitcoin's security. Finney attacks are when miners secretly work on a block containing a double spend and run to the merchant and pay when they eventually find a block. The idea of discouraging blocks that perform Finney attacks by having honest miners refuse to build on them has been proposed but has some problems. 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. This mechanism would only apply to coinbases, not arbitrary transactions, thus it cannot be used to steal arbitrary users' bitcoins.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T21:08:37.852065+00:00