Author: Mike Hearn 2015-02-23 11:03:36
Published on: 2015-02-23T11:03:36+00:00
At the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, a merchant sold some T-shirts and accepted zero-confirmation transactions. However, the transactions depended on other unconfirmed transactions that never went through, leaving the merchant without payment. While this risk can be priced in when enough data is available, further investigation into the situation could reveal valuable insights. Questions to consider include whether the dependent transaction was non-standard or double spent, and whether a wallet could have co-operated with the P2P network to detect and flag the issue. The author notes that such situations are often not the result of maliciousness, but rather a software failure that wasn't detected well enough.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T17:39:26.114432+00:00