Author: Aaron Voisine 2017-01-04 00:36:34
Published on: 2017-01-04T00:36:34+00:00
In this email conversation, Aaron Voisine, the co-founder and CEO of breadwallet, argues that unconfirmed transactions are important for real-world use. He explains that in situations where credit card transactions are accepted, it is useful to know that a transaction has been initiated, even though it can be reversed up to 60 days later. However, another participant in the conversation points out that non-validating SPV wallets have no idea if an unconfirmed transaction they are seeing is anything but properly formatted. They connect to an easily manipulated, sybil-attacked, and untrusted network and then ask for financial information. Voisine responds that if the sender doesn't control the receiver's network connection, then the information the receiver gains by watching the mempool is if the transaction has propagated across the bitcoin network. This is useful to know in all kinds of situations. The conversation continues with discussions about mempool filtering, committed bloom filters, and lightning network use cases. One participant is not convinced that unconfirmed transaction display in a wallet is worth the privacy trade-off. Despite this difference of opinion, Voisine asserts that unconfirmed transactions are incredibly important for many use cases and that there is a large cost to losing the ability to have instant transactions. He emphasizes that bitcoin serves a wide variety of use cases with different profiles for time sensitivity and fraud risk. In conclusion, the conversation explores different ways to handle 0-conf/mempool filtering and the potential deployment of BFD (Bloom Filter Discovery).
Updated on: 2023-06-11T04:59:01.688124+00:00