Author: Andy Parkins 2011-12-22 14:46:54
Published on: 2011-12-22T14:46:54+00:00
In this email conversation from December 2011, Joel Joonatan Kaartinen and Andy Parkins discuss the importance of transaction verification in a decentralized network. While joining the network as a node is low-cost, nodes that do not verify transactions can't reliably forward failed verifications without getting blamed for doing faulty work. This creates an incentive for nodes not to relay failed verifications, making it important to know which nodes will be checking transactions or not so as not to isolate oneself from other nodes that are also checking transactions. Andy suggests that once a negative-announce message exists, it wouldn't be hard to have positive-announce and neutral-announce messages as well, which would allow forwarders to offer an opinion on the quality of a transaction. A web of trust would be required to gain an advantage from this classified forwarding, as nodes need some way of assigning enough trust to forward a classified transaction without checking it themselves. Dishonesty using positive-announce and negative-announce to lie would result in isolation.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T00:47:48.399240+00:00