Author: Mike Hearn 2014-04-24 08:39:41
Published on: 2014-04-24T08:39:41+00:00
On April 24, 2014, Gregory Maxwell and another individual debated about the concept of miners in Bitcoin. Maxwell argued that miners should not be considered as “trusted parties” in a decentralized system, while the other individual claimed that miners were indeed trusted parties, just not simultaneously. They explained that Bitcoin could tolerate some dishonest miners to operate, but not all of them. The white paper established this principle from the beginning, and it is common sense. Moreover, the other individual suggested that a small change to the existing protocol is better than building an entirely new system from scratch. They also proposed an enhancement to the current system that would ensure corrupt miners do not get paid for services they did not provide. Lastly, they discussed how miners can temporarily censor transactions by orphaning valid blocks; however, coinbases are deletable, and if some miners fork the chain and build a longer one, others will switch to it, and the coinbases blocks they previously mined will never become spendable.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T21:02:23.685305+00:00