Author: Adam Back 2014-04-28 21:41:02
Published on: 2014-04-28T21:41:02+00:00
In an email conversation between Gareth Williams and Adam Back, the topic of Bitcoin's trustless nature was discussed. Gareth Williams mentioned that Bitcoin is a perfect "trustless" mathematical machine. They both agreed that the idea of a populist vote to redistribute or remove mining rewards would be an inelegant solution and could devolve into politics. The main reason for this is because it is not provable, which means no consensus rule can be constructed requiring proof, thus risking a political decision. However, Gareth presented a proposal to replace it with a statement that says the economic majority will not cooperate to reinterpret history against any good guys, only against bad guys; "please trust their good judgment." Adam agreed with Gareth's proposal, calling it nicely put. Adam then highlighted the potential risks of Finney attackers for hire who may anonymize their blocks and demand identification of blocks. He stated that this is generally undesirable for the objective of avoiding centralization and policy abuse, and there is no identity in a distributed system. Finally, Adam suggested a three-step plan for voting away rewards using tracer payments through Finney attackers, but the proof is non-transitive, so people can vote anyway they like for any reason.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:51:28.669357+00:00