Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-02-21 22:47:28
Published on: 2015-02-21T22:47:28+00:00
The concept of "scorched earth" in the bitcoin community refers to the negative impact that policies would have on present-day 0-conf usage. Payment processors process transactions through a scoring system and accept 0-conf transactions. However, deploying something that makes 0-conf transactions unusable would negatively impact present-day bitcoin payments. Without decentralized solutions for instant payments, replace-by-fee policies would push instant transactions further into the realm of centralized, walled-garden services. The need for reversal through a human-in-the-loop is necessary since there is a possibility of mass trojaned hardware. Furthermore, if the base currency is assumed to be non-reversible, it becomes brittle and too big to fail. Most applications are quite happy running on reversible systems, and in some cases, these systems are more reliable and lower risk. It is better to deal with a known, predictable, and relatively continuous transaction reversal rate than sudden failures where some anonymous bad actor makes off with a fortune. In conclusion, replace-by-fee policies must be adequately modularized to support several policies as one step at a time.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:51:31.501721+00:00