Author: Tomas 2017-06-09 08:26:52
Published on: 2017-06-09T08:26:52+00:00
In an email conversation between Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Tomas, the latter questioned the benefits of weakly verifiable outpoints and pubkey hashes. He argued that they only serve as notifications and do not pose any attack vectors. In response, Olaoluwa referred to a BIP, which highlights the possibility of full nodes lying by omission, leading to denial of service and undesirable failure modes in applications that rely on certain on-chain events. While the compact header chain is used to mitigate this issue, Tomas was still unclear about its use cases and trade-offs. He noted that for normal wallets, the only possible attack would be a nuisance caused by pretending a transaction did not confirm yet. However, for applications that critically depend on knowing what happens on-chain, downloading TXIDs with PoW security would be a better option. Tomas suggested that knowledge of incoming TXIDs could be gained through the payment protocol. He also questioned whether there were enough use cases that critically depended on pubkey hashes being used on-chain to justify the costs of the compact header chain.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:32:39.997674+00:00