Author: Natanael 2015-02-12 15:32:37
Published on: 2015-02-12T15:32:37+00:00
In an email from February 12th, 2015, Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn warned against a proposed security feature for Bitcoin called "scorched earth." Scorched earth was designed to punish double-spending by destroying both the funds sent and the change in the sender's wallet. Hearn argued that scorched earth would incentivize miners to steal arbitrary payments if they worked with the sender of the money, as well as incentivize competitors to engage in payment fraud against each other. He suggested that zero-conf needed another form of security besides scorched earth to guarantee that it could not be double-spent in the relevant time frame. Hearn believed that scorched earth was a bad idea and unnecessary since it added complexity to a system that was already difficult to understand.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:50:34.123616+00:00