Author: Troy Benjegerdes 2015-03-01 17:59:50
Published on: 2015-03-01T17:59:50+00:00
The proposal named "Solomon's spend" presents a solution to the issue of bitcoin double-spending. The scenario involves a hacked exchange, where bitcoins are moved and creates a double-spend of the original transaction. However, the exchange has a contract with an insurance company and miners for 'scorched earth' theft response. This creates an incentive for miners to roll back the chain and start re-mining the block where the theft occurred. The exchange gets an insurance payout, some miner wins the lottery, and the thief gets nothing. The proposal requires a change to the consensus rules, but it is argued that getting bitcoin to scale will require this no matter what. There are two different motivations for double-spending: the ability to replace a fee and the ability to replace outputs. If the double-spend replaces only inputs (but keeps at least one input in common), it is considered a genuine fee replacement. Conversely, if at least one of the inputs is kept but none of the outputs were, it is considered the latter. A wallet can be built that always does the former when doing fee replacement by using another transaction to create an output with the exact additional desired fee. If we can distinguish these two cases clearly, then the fee replacement case can be handled by relaying both and letting miners pick one or the other while the output replacement case could be handled by rewarding everything to a miner. Jeff Garzik argues that many use insecure 0-conf transactions for rapid payments, and deploying something that makes 0-conf transactions unusable would have a wide, negative impact on present-day bitcoin payments. Lacking a coded, reviewed alternative, ceasing the maintaining of first seen policies alone is simply not a realistic option. Instant payments need a security upgrade.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:52:26.101849+00:00