Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-06-21 00:36:47
Published on: 2015-06-21T00:36:47+00:00
In a chain of emails, Eric Lombrozo and Justus Ranvier discussed the concept of non-repudiation in Bitcoin transactions. Lombrozo argued that Bitcoin has no concept of identity, so even if a signature implies a promise to pay, there is no way to associate it with a legal entity. He suggested that we should refrain from attaching any further significance to transaction signatures other than "the sender was willing to have it included in the blockchain if a miner were to have seen it and accepted it...but perhaps the sender would have changed their mind before it actually did get accepted." Ranvier countered that in any commercial transaction, the parties involved must know some minimal amount of identity information in order to transact at all. He also stated that a payee is justified in treating a double spend of a payment sent to them as part of a commercial transaction as a fraud attempt and employing whatever non-Bitcoin recourse mechanisms, if any, they have access to. Lombrozo responded that the behavior Ranvier claimed as "obviously correct" is not necessarily correct and may introduce harmful unintended side effects, like making fraud easier.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:45:40.339040+00:00