Author: David A. Harding 2020-04-23 09:59:57
Published on: 2020-04-23T09:59:57+00:00
In a discussion on the Bitcoin development mailing list, Matt Corallo pointed out that if an attacker targets miners with a transaction containing a hash preimage that is not available to the network at large, they could still pull off a pinning attack. Dave suggested that one solution would be to bribe the miner for that knowledge or create a bribe via Lightning Network (LN) probes. If a miner knows the preimage, they are incentivized to include the transaction in their next block and any non-miner who knows it can create a child transaction. The non-miner may not profit from this, but they can learn the preimage when Bob's wallet processes the block. Additionally, even if the attacker sends one version of the transaction just to miners and another conflicting version to all relay nodes, miners will naturally attempt to relay the preimage version of the transaction to other users, so targeted relay to miners may not be effective at preventing Bob from learning the preimage. However, this requires people to run additional software to keep track of potential preimages and then compare them to hash candidates, and it requires additional complexity in LN clients.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T00:53:52.159198+00:00