Author: John Dillon 2013-06-28 10:09:16
Published on: 2013-06-28T10:09:16+00:00
In this email conversation, Mike Hearn expresses concern about the uncorrected issues with Bitcoinj, particularly the lack of proxy support which prevents users from following recommended best practices of using it with Tor. However, he notes that leaks via the blockchain are a more significant privacy issue than through the network layer and that Tor may not be effective in protecting against Sybil attacks. He suggests that node-to-node connections should be encrypted to protect against network-wide passive sniffing. The discussion then shifts to the distinction between "safe" and "not safe" transactions, which Hearn argues is misleading. He and others have run experiments with double-spend generators against replace-by-fee nodes and found that some double-spends appear to be mined under replace-by-fee rules. While this figure is small (about 0.25% of hashing power), Hearn notes that it's surprising given that there hasn't been a serious attempt yet to get miners to use replace-by-fee rules. Finally, Hearn suggests an interesting experiment: advertising that money is being given away by a transaction generator in the mining forum. He also mentions Peter Todd's ideas for a "scorched-earth" double-spend countermeasure but notes that there has been little progress on the code front.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:22:07.852626+00:00