Author: Chris Belcher 2020-05-12 21:05:46
Published on: 2020-05-12T21:05:46+00:00
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Antoine Riard raised concerns that the trust-minimization of Bitcoin security model may be compromised by Lightning Network (LN) adoption. Luke Dashjr responded, stating that LN cannot shift this paradigm as Bitcoin's security depends on the assumption that a supermajority of the economy is verifying their incoming transactions using their own full node. Lloyd Fournier questioned this claim and asked for an explanation behind it. Dashjr explained that the problem arises when a large part of the ecosystem gets scammed at once. He provided an example where if 10 out of 10000 users use a full-node wallet while the other 9990 use an SPV wallet, then if a miner attacked the system by printing infinite bitcoins and spending coins without a valid signature, the 9990 SPV wallets would accept those fake coins as payment, and trade the coins amongst themselves. This would cause Bitcoin to split into two currencies: full-node-coin and SPV-coin.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:15:40.900604+00:00