Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-24 09:25:02
Published on: 2014-04-24T09:25:02+00:00
In a 2014 email thread, Mike Hearn and Luke-Jr discussed various proposals for improving the Bitcoin blockchain. Hearn argued that the system should be improved to get closer to its end goal, while Luke-Jr believed that the existing algorithm was immutable and any changes would have to align with the system's original purpose. They also disagreed on whether miners could be trusted or not, with Hearn arguing that they were generally reliable due to the incentives of the system, while Luke-Jr believed that miners could not be trusted and that proposals that involved them conspiring to blacklist transactions produced by others could lead to worse violations of the system's promises. Hearn also criticized Luke-Jr's proposal to take txouts that were previously assigned to one party and simply assign them to others, as it would lay the groundwork for additional forms of censorship and would not actually prevent theft. He suggested allowing only a small number of paid reordering transactions per block to prevent forming a quorum on the decision to revoke the coinbase. Peter Todd also proposed using the mechanism to claw back mining income from a hardware vendor accused of violating its agreements on the amount of self-mining on customers' hardware, which Hearn believed had more salient harm to miners than the potential harm from reordering non-existent transactions.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:42:41.134840+00:00