Author: Elden Tyrell 2012-01-03 01:39:09
Published on: 2012-01-03T01:39:09+00:00
In a conversation between Gregory Maxwell and an unknown person on January 2, 2012, they discuss a Bitcoin transaction that could be used to double-spend coins. The unknown person suggests that if a node controls the private keys for a transaction, and that transaction makes it into the chain then it can safely assume that its unspent (at least once it's buried a few blocks into the chain). However, Gregory is not so sure about this because an attacker could use the same faked block sequence to attack multiple clients by putting several double-spend transactions in the first faked block. This would spread out the cost over more than one attack. Simply checking that the value of the transaction is less than X*50 isn't necessarily enough, although the logistics of the attack aren't exactly easy. There's also the question of knowing what the difficulty for those X blocks ought to be.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T01:38:26.817669+00:00