Author: Peter Todd 2018-06-09 13:02:55
Published on: 2018-06-09T13:02:55+00:00
The email thread discusses an attack on Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) wallets and nodes. The attack can bypass thousands of confirmations without a Sybil attack, which affects SPV wallets as well. However, the protections needed for SPV nodes to prevent such attacks are different and should be considered separately. One way for SPV nodes to avoid accepting payments is by checking if any Merkle node is at the same time a valid transaction, which essentially eliminates the problem. False positive rates can be kept under one in a billion by using known bits to distinguish between inner nodes and transactions. Despite this, the concept of SPV is discredited and not worth concern.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T03:13:58.979277+00:00