Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-03-13 21:15:22
Published on: 2013-03-13T21:15:22+00:00
The email conversation between Andy Parkins and Luke-Jr on March 13, 2013, discusses the failure of the development of two chains and how it was a maximally bad decision. The state was irreconcilable without manual intervention, and the assurance to users by the client that their transactions were secure was not met. Luke-Jr proposed changing the definition of "6 confirmations" so that it only clears of any other chain and is reliable while there are two competing chains. However, this proposal is not reliable as you will only hear about a competing chain if some of your peers have accepted it. Additionally, relaying non-primary chains has obvious and subtle challenges such as preventing it from being a DOS vector and rating limit by only relaying chains which are close to the current best in sum difficulty. Another subtle issue mentioned is that it's not in a node's self-interest to tell peers about an invalid chain, as it wants its peers on its view of the consensus, not some other one. A potential solution suggested by Luke-Jr is to only relay headers for non-primary chains.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T16:41:29.725426+00:00