Author: Mike Hearn 2014-04-24 11:43:20
Published on: 2014-04-24T11:43:20+00:00
In an email conversation, Jorge Timón and Gregory Maxwell discussed the definition of "honest miners" and how they prevent double-spending. Maxwell argued that miners do not prevent double-spending by proof of work but ignore it instead. He also disagreed with Timón's definition of honesty in Bitcoin as being based on first-seen transactions. Maxwell believed that if all miners were willing to double-spend for a fee, then Bitcoin would fail because paying miners to rewrite the chain at will would render it useless. He explained that even well-buried transactions could be profitably double-spent, making the current algorithm imperfect but workable in achieving the actual goal of preventing double-spends.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:52:34.761482+00:00