Author: Luke-Jr 2014-01-01 05:09:27
Published on: 2014-01-01T05:09:27+00:00
In an email exchange on January 1st, 2014 between Peter Todd and Luke-Jr, they discussed the use of merge-mining as a potential security issue for altcoins. Todd argued that merge-mining makes it easy for attackers to perform a 51% attack on altcoins with low hashing power. However, Luke-Jr disagreed, stating that any non-scam altcoin is safe using merged mining since attackers would have an interest in investing in the altcoin instead of attacking it. He also mentioned that merged mining allows for increased security for non-scam altcoins. Todd responded by saying that the value of a crypto-currency is not equal to all miners. He proposed a hypothetical scenario where he creates a merge-mined Zerocoin implementation with BTC/ZTC exchange rate enforced by software. In this case, some miners may not agree that enabling better privacy is a good thing, or their local governments won't allow it, which may make the system vulnerable to attack. However, if the Zerocoin scheme was implemented by embedding ZTC transactions within standard Bitcoin transactions, even without hiding them, the attackers would need a 50% majority of hashing power to succeed. The trade-off in this case would be potentially slow confirmations.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T23:20:44.876680+00:00