Author: Daniel Lidstrom 2012-06-25 23:21:14
Published on: 2012-06-25T23:21:14+00:00
The conversation between Mike and Daniel discusses the potential for bad or hacked client developers to be involved in a conspiracy with miners to cheat the system. The official Bitcoin client is addressing this issue through its gitian system, which involves multiple developers compiling the same source to the same binary and signing the results. This raises the bar for releasing hacked clients significantly. The conversation also touches on the importance of lightweight clients being able to audit the coinbase transaction and the difficulty of calculating fees without all input transactions being available. To address this, compartmentalizing errors could make them individually cheaper to verify. This could involve requiring error messages to be received by a quorum of peers before checking and dropping unreliable peers. Hashcash could also be used to balance costs to send and verify a given type of error message. Further, SPV clients could subscribe to announcements of invalid blocks and their specific failure mode to keep rule enforcement decentralized while scaling Bitcoin. The conversation acknowledges that mobile clients may struggle with verifying coinbase transaction invalidity, particularly if the block size limit is lifted. To address this, they suggest splitting up the summing of the spendable fees into verifiable pieces and including these in a new Merkle tree. Verifying a claim of invalidity of one of these leaves would require downloading about 1MB of transaction data and verifying inclusion, which could still be manageable for a smart phone at large transaction volumes. Overall, the conversation highlights the importance of trust models, decentralization, and auditing in ensuring the integrity of the Bitcoin system.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T05:56:59.283701+00:00