Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-08-01 00:17:25
Published on: 2015-08-01T00:17:25+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev email thread, Hector Chu pointed out that there is no connection between transactions and the blocks they appear in. Transactions can be received and accepted in different orders by various nodes. The blockchain serves the purpose of resolving any potential conflicting transactions by providing a globally agreed total ordering as soon as one of the forks accepts a different transaction in a conflicting set. A split occurs when transactions exist on one chain but cannot exist on the other due to the acceptance of different transactions in a conflicting set. One can intentionally produce such a split to separate the existence of their coins onto the separate forks, just like performing a reorg-and-respend attack on a single blockchain. New coins and fees are issued on both chains, becoming spendable after 100 blocks, and any transaction spending them can exist exclusively on one chain.Moreover, any transaction whose casual history extends from the above cases can exist only on one chain, which means someone who has single-chain coins (via a conflict or from coinbase outputs) can pay a small amount to many users to get their wallets to consume them and make more of the transactions single chain only. Hector Chu also mentioned that migrating miners to a bigger chain in search of higher profits due to a higher volume of fees is an oversimplification. He used an example where he could release a version of the software programmed to reassign ownership of a million of the earliest created unmoved coins to him at block 400k and then make a transaction to pay 5 coin/block in fees. In this situation, it may pay more in fees, but whether miners would move to this chain remains uncertain.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T21:09:58.697707+00:00