Published on: 2015-02-09T13:37:39+00:00
Peter Todd has provided feedback on a proposal aiming to reduce the confirmation time of Bitcoin transactions from 10 minutes to around 30 seconds. However, Todd expressed concerns about the assumptions made in the proposal, highlighting that simply seeing or not seeing a transaction does not guarantee its validity. The author of the proposal responded by explaining that they have developed local rules to achieve a desirable outcome for the network. While the proposal addresses two specific attacks, the author remains open to learning about new attacks and flaws in existing treatments.One concern raised by Todd is the punishment of miners with imperfect connectivity, which he believes is unattainable in a decentralized system. The author argued that it is necessary to build from unavoidable imperfections when dealing with physical reality. Todd also mentioned that the proposal makes single-confirm double-spend attacks easier and puts more people at risk. However, the author disagreed, stating that the proposal effectively prevents most Finney attacks. The proposal suggests allowing transactions to mature for 15 to 30 seconds before mining them.To influence miners not to confirm double-spends after a certain time limit, an update has been introduced that changes the disincentive from a simple delay to a temporary chain work penalty. This change is crucial for the growth and stabilization of adoption. The penalty is graduated in two steps based on the respend gap, a concept first suggested by Hal Finney in 2011. The purpose of this change is to influence the miner of the block after a deprecated block, who in turn is concerned with the block after that. The double-spend deprecation window has been updated on Github to reflect this change, which is believed to be the minimum requirement to achieve the intended result.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T11:24:30.978632+00:00