Author: Antoine Riard 2020-05-13 19:51:29
Published on: 2020-05-13T19:51:29+00:00
In a discussion about the security model of Bitcoin, Antoine suggests that economic weight of nodes should be considered in evaluating miner consensus-hijack success. He points out that even if miners can lure a majority of SPV clients, they may not be able to stir economic nodes as they may not have the same economic weight. To strengthen SPV, Antoine recommends implementing forks detection and fallback to some backup node(s) which would serve as an authoritative source to arbiter between branches. However, such backup node(s) must be picked up manually at client initialization before any risk of conflict to avoid Reddit-style of hijack during contentious period or other massive social engineering. Chris Belcher responds to a claim made by Luke Dashjr about the security model of Bitcoin being compromised by LN where fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment services may attract a lot of adoption without users running a full-node. Chris explains how such an attack could happen in practice and why it is important for a supermajority of the economy to be verifying their incoming transactions using their own full node. In the event of an attack on the system, a large part of the ecosystem would get scammed at once, and Bitcoin would split into two currencies: full-node-coin and SPV-coin. The fraud miners may become well known, but the SPV-wallet ecosystem has a strong incentive to be against any rollback, and they may even decide to use something like `invalidateblock` to make sure their SPV-coin doesn't get reorg'd out of existence. Ultimately, "Bitcoin" would become SPV-coin with inflation and arbitrary seizure, which would compromise Bitcoin's security model.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:13:58.087690+00:00