Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-23 19:47:46
Published on: 2014-04-23T19:47:46+00:00
In an email exchange, Mike Hearn and others discuss the definition of a Finney attack, which involves mining a block with a transaction paying oneself, quickly making a transaction spending that coin to someone else, and releasing the block after the recipient has taken irreversible action. This type of attack has a cost of some small increase in the number of orphan blocks experienced. Hearn also proposes a protocol involving assigning funds to a 2 of 2 multisig with himself and Oscar, where he does not announce this transaction until he gets Oscar to sign a timelocked anyonecanpay refund to send the coin back to him. Later, he can make instant payments with Oscar signing up until the refund time comes close to anyone who trusts Oscar to never double-spend. The proposal is not viewed as a "return to trusted third parties" but rather a very narrowly scoped trust, filling in precisely where large-scale decentralized consensus is fundamentally weak. Hearn argues against proposals that overly depend on colluding miners to behave in specific ways, stating that he is more in favor of adding a little bit of Mastercard to transactions where Mastercard is what people want, than turning mining and bitcoin itself into Mastercard. Finally, Hearn notes that strong zero-conf security isn't a part of what many people think of when they think of Bitcoin's characteristics, and there are ways to improve it that don't involve asking miners to participate in a majority vote to take away funds from people.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:45:25.865324+00:00