Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-06-19 15:37:10
Published on: 2015-06-19T15:37:10+00:00
The Bitcoin network was designed to withstand double-spend attacks and relaxing this assumption without assessing the risk could be dangerous. The protocol itself makes no assumptions regarding the intentions behind someone signing two conflicting transactions, which could make sense in certain use cases. However, viewing signing a conflicting transaction as fraud and vandalism means that if a transaction is not mined for a long time, funds must remain in limbo forever. The controversy around full replace-by-fee (RBF) support enabled by F2Pool, the largest pool with 21% of the hashing power, has sparked discussions on whether it encourages intentional fraud and vandalism or is simply reducing the value of change address to pay a higher fee. The issue has also highlighted the challenge of dealing with fraud in a decentralized system like Bitcoin, which spans multiple legal jurisdictions and allows anonymous use. Some argue that unprosecutable fraud is still fraud and should not be encouraged. The debate also extends to other technical implementations like Bitcoin XT, which relays double-spends and makes it easier to get double-spends to miners.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:43:47.221843+00:00