Author: Andreas Schildbach 2017-06-19 20:49:17
Published on: 2017-06-19T20:49:17+00:00
On June 19, 2017, a discussion took place on the bitcoin-dev forum regarding BIP37 and its impact on unconfirmed transactions. The concept of SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) was brought up and it was noted that it is not applicable to unconfirmed transactions. SPV relies on the fact that miners have committed to a transaction with work to give assurance to the user that the transaction is valid. However, in the case of unconfirmed transactions, they are costlessly forgeable by anyone including the ISP, which means there is no such assurance.The entire thread discussed the privacy losses due to BIP37 and how users may be unaware of them. As a result, many lite clients are using mempool filtering which gives false assurance to users that there is a valid but yet-to-be-confirmed transaction sending them money. Tadge, who was not involved in the debate over BIP37 when it was being written, stated that he does not know how mempool filtering was included, but it never made any sense to him.Overall, the issue at hand is that most SPV wallets make it clear that unconfirmed transactions are just that - unconfirmed. While mempool filtering may give users false assurance, it is important to remember that unconfirmed transactions are not final and can still be rejected by the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:32:11.112582+00:00