Author: Mike Hearn 2014-04-24 07:58:42
Published on: 2014-04-24T07:58:42+00:00
The email conversation discusses the trade-offs and applicability of different approaches used to prevent double spending in transactions. The Proof-of-Work (PoW) approach has advantages like neutrality, censorship-resistance, and high degree of security but its inherent disadvantage is that it takes some time until a transaction becomes practically irreversible. The proposal of building an entirely separate system for stopping double spends is seen as having significant costs and disadvantages compared to making simple tweaks to strengthen the existing mechanism. Censorship-resistance is considered irrelevant by one party when buying a cup of coffee with pocket money, however, the other party argues that having to wait for a large expiry period to extract money from the "double spending prevention service" is a pain and many merchants would refuse to take newly double spendable money. Thus, such a scheme would return to a world similar to the one we have now. Instead of considering hybrid solutions, the proposal is to make the PoW-based system more complex to be applicable for real-time transactions too. However, building an entirely separate system is complex and messy. Deleting coinbases with nothing more than a simple majority is already possible in the existing protocol and always has been, so it is unclear how this proposal would weaken the advantages provided by PoW.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:53:34.442292+00:00