Author: digitsu at gmail.com 2015-10-13 00:08:49
Published on: 2015-10-13T00:08:49+00:00
The discussion in this email thread is about the potential risks associated with a soft fork in the Bitcoin network. The email by digitsu412 argues that the effectiveness of an attack depends on the percentage of hash power that did not upgrade, and if it was only 5%, the attack would not be effective unless the attacker knew a merchant on the minority of the network. In response, Anthony Towns provides a scenario where 5% of hash power is running old software along with 1500 nodes, while 95% of hash power is running new software along with 4000 nodes. Towns argues that even with just 5% hash power and ~30% of nodes left running the old version, a "damaging soft fork" still poses a fairly high risk to someone receiving payments via an SPV client, and trusting transactions with few confirmations. The original emailer then questions the actual significance of the risks posed by such an attack, as it would require waiting quite a long time for a block to be created and executing the double spend maliciously would be difficult due to the unpredictability of when such a block would occur. They also suggest that the chances of such an attack could be further reduced if merchants used upgraded wallets and avoided using SPV wallets. The possibility of malicious wallet software that always publishes "bad" transactions first is also discussed. Finally, both parties agree that even if the risk is low, it's better to avoid it if possible.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:16:09.639126+00:00