Author: Amir Taaki 2012-01-27 16:37:05
Published on: 2012-01-27T16:37:05+00:00
In an email sent by Amir Taaki to the Bitcoin development mailing list in 2012, he questioned why there was a 20 confirmations addition to COINBASE_MATURITY. He proposed that this measure was put in place to discourage spending until 120 confirms, despite the underlying protocol accepting spent transactions at 100 confirms. Taaki suggests that if someone were determined enough to hack their client, they could still spend before 120 confirms, but after 100. It is possible that Satoshi overestimated the number of competing races between mined blocks, leading to the implementation of this measure. Taaki speculates that the reason for adding 20 confirmations is likely to ensure that transactions are accepted by the network when sent out and to prevent potential network partitions causing another fork to get built up. At around 20 confirmations, one can be sure that the rest of the network also has 100 confirmations off the original mined block. On the other hand, at 100 confirms, there may be a chain ahead of everyone else or a temporary network partition (islanding) that causes another fork to get built up, leading to not everyone having 100 confirms.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T01:54:48.174113+00:00