Author: Jorge Timón 2014-04-24 13:57:04
Published on: 2014-04-24T13:57:04+00:00
In a thread of discussion on 24th April 2014, Mike Hearn explained that the mechanism used by Bitcoin to prevent double spends is to ignore them. He further added that proof of work is used to arrive at a shared consensus ordering given the possibility that transactions arrived at different times. Hearn was amazed at how many people saw the current algorithm as the goal in and of itself, instead of an imperfect but workable means of achieving the actual goal. He clarified that the goal is still peer-to-peer transaction serialization and it is achieved through proof of work, not through "miner's honesty." Hearn criticized the argument from authority and explained that first-seen is not a protocol rule that validators can use to discriminate the longest valid chain and therefore is not enforceable. Not even through a soft fork because miners can't know which transactions other miners saw first. Miners that mine on top of the longest valid chain are helping to make transactions irreversible whether they implement a first-saw or a replace-by-fee policy. Hearn also disagreed with the notion that all miners are willing to double spend for a fee. He stated that if this were true, then Bitcoin would not work since the miners would be willing to fork the chain at any point to claim the higher fee on the new transaction. This is because rewriting the chain gets exponentially more expensive as time passes. Hearn asserted that smart miners are those who implement replace-by-fee and child-pays-for-parent policies, not miners trying to rewrite history, which is about as smart as mining on top of orphan blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:57:52.585153+00:00