Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-06-24 18:03:10
Published on: 2012-06-24T18:03:10+00:00
In a message from June 24, 2012, Mike Hearn discussed a proposal made by d'aniel to have good nodes broadcast announcements when they detect a rule violation, along with a proof of the violation. This idea was also proposed by Hearn on the same mailing list and elaborated on in an IRC chat. The use of proofs would mean that a node doing validation with TxOUT tree which hasn't personally witnessed the complete history of Bitcoin actually has basically the same security as a full node today because in order to get away with a lie every single node must conspire. It's adequate that only one honest node witness the lie because once it has the proof information is hard to suppress. In a public IRC log, Hearn explained that this proposal fits nicely with Satoshi's comment "It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle." This would make it safe to late-join a txout tree chain because if there is only a single other honest node in the world who was around long enough to witness the cheating, he could still tell you and it would be as good as if you saw it yourself. This is similar to the provable doublespend alert stuff discussed before, but applied to blocks. Multiple people coming up with this proposal is a good sign that it might actually be viable.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T03:52:39.535400+00:00