Author: Peter Todd 2014-12-20 14:48:01
Published on: 2014-12-20T14:48:01+00:00
Gregory Maxwell and Peter Todd have different philosophical approaches to blockchains. Maxwell prioritizes the blockchain as an anti-replay oracle, while Todd prioritizes it as a publication layer. Anti-Replay means ensuring that an action, such as spending a txout, can only happen once and cannot be replayed again. An Anti-Replay Oracle is a trusted third party that operates on a message m, pubkey p, and valid signature sig1 for m, p. The anti-replay oracle is sufficient to implement a digital currency, as long as the trusted oracle is honest; coins cannot be double-spent and securely passed from owner-to-owner with an ever-growing transcript proving each valid spend. Bitcoin miners act as a trusted anti-replay oracle. If they follow the Bitcoin protocol faithfully, for any given txout, one and only one valid scriptSig will ever be accepted into the blockchain, making the spend of a txout a valid anti-replay-protected signature. Given a secure proof-of-publication system, we can prove non-replay. Uniquebits allows Alice to prove to Bob that some set of records R_i that she has given to Bob is the same set of records she has given to everyone else. Fidelity-Bonded Ledgers and Federated Sidechains both describe the notion of a trusted third party who guarantees the correct maintenance of some financial ledger according to some set of rules. As someone relying on a transaction within the ledger itself still needs to audit their view of the ledger, Uniquebits can use the same principles for fidelity-bonded ledgers/federated sidechains. The third party periodically publishes the ledger state to the Bitcoin blockchain allowing anyone to detect if their copy of the ledger is incomplete. Censorship of the ledger state publications is an issue; however, in the case of financial ledgers with pegged funds, we can use the pegged funds themselves in the publication. This requires a majority of hashing power supporting the blacklist and is a highly politically charged issue in the Bitcoin community.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T14:58:14.774302+00:00