Author: Adam Back 2013-05-15 11:49:56
Published on: 2013-05-15T11:49:56+00:00
In May 2013, a discussion on Bitcoin protocol voting was initiated by Peter Todd. He stated that any attacker who controls enough hashing power to pose a 51% attack can demand the use of a modified Bitcoin client to facilitate the evaluation of their policy. In response, Adam clarified that protocol voting is a vote per user policy preference and not a CPU vote. The current Bitcoin protocol is vulnerable to arbitrary policies being imposed by a quorum of more than 50% miners. Adam suggested that the blind commitment proposal could fix this issue. This would prevent even a 99% quorum from imposing policies, leaving the weaker protocol vote attack as the only remaining avenue for an attack. He considered the feasibility of protocol voting attacks as an open question. However, he drew attention to the seeming unstoppability of peer-to-peer (p2p) protocols as a hint.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T16:59:33.971237+00:00