Author: Peter Todd 2015-02-22 12:34:28
Published on: 2015-02-22T12:34:28+00:00
On February 22, 2015, Adam Back wrote an email in which he advocated for the implementation of a general purpose scripting language improvement. This would eliminate the need to rely entirely on inherently unreliable P2P networking. The proposed solution involves making another transaction that is set up in advance such that if Alice doublespends, Bob gets the money, and Alice pays a bunch of cash to miners fees. Ideally, proof of double spend should be done at the protocol level. However, implementing this improvement has a lot of advantages, not least of which is that detection of the double-spend can happen later. In response to criticism, Back argued that replace-by-fee scorched-earth does what he proposes without the need for a soft-fork but with less flexibility. He also questioned whether releasing a version of Bitcoin Core with different IsStandard() rules than the previous version, mining with a different policy than other people, or mining at a pool that gets sybil attacked was considered vandalism. Back's argument was that every one of those things causes people to get double-spent in the real world, even losing tens of thousands of dollars until they get some sense and stop treating unconfirmed transactions as confirmed. Back used a wedding party scenario to explain his point. He compared hosting a wedding right next to a hairpin corner at a rally race and complaining about mud getting on pretty white dresses to treating unconfirmed transactions as confirmed. Back argued that it was not vandalism if someone decided to tell the wedding party to leave before someone gets hurt. In the same vein, he asked if it was vandalism when someone decided to take off the mudguards during a race to encourage the wedding party to leave before someone got actually hurt.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T17:39:58.188390+00:00