{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2014-04-24\n📝 Original message:On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Jorge Timón \u003cjtimon at monetize.io\u003e wrote:\n\n\u003e \u003e I'm using it in the same sense Satoshi used it. Honest miners work to\n\u003e \u003e prevent double spends. That's the entire justification for their\n\u003e existence.\n\u003e\n\u003e I thought the mechanism they used to prevent double-spends was proof of\n\u003e work.\n\u003e Therefore dishonest miners where only those who mine on top of a block\n\u003e which is not the longest valid chain they've seen.\n\u003e\n\nNo! This is a misunderstanding. The mechanism they use to prevent double\nspends is to *ignore double spends*. The blocks they created indicate the\nordering of transactions they saw and proof of work is used to arrive at a\nshared consensus ordering given the possibility that transactions arrived\nat different times.\n\nI'm continually amazed at how many people seem to see the current algorithm\nas the goal in and of itself, instead of an imperfect but workable means of\nachieving the actual goal.\n\nTo distinguish this definition from your own \"honest miners are those\n\u003e who decide on double-spends by mining the transaction they saw first\"\n\u003e\n\nThis definition of honesty is not my own, the one Bitcoin has always used.\nObviously if Satoshi had wanted transactions to be double spendable by fee\nin the mempool he would have made Bitcoin work that way, instead of coming\nup with the nSequence based replacement scheme instead.\n\nFirst-seen *is* a protocol rule, as much as Set-Cookie storing data in a\nbrowser is an HTTP protocol rule. The fact that auditing compliance with it\nis harder to do than some others does not make it less of a rule.\n\nI completely disagree.\n\u003e Miner's proof of work makes transactions irreversible.\n\n\nAgain you are hopelessly confused. Miners that are trying to double spend\nare *by definition* not making transactions irreversible, they are trying\nto make transactions reversible.\n\nLook at it this way. There is no inherent reason BitUndo has to undo only\nFinney attacks. If it gets sufficient hash power it could offer undoing of\n1-confirm transactions too, right? Sure it'll mostly fail but that's\nalready a part of its business model. Sometimes it'll get two blocks in a\nrow and succeed. It's a very minor tweak to what they're doing. Would you\nargue these miners are still useful? After all, it's impossible to be\ncertain after the fact that miners built on top of the \"wrong\" block\nbecause forks occur naturally.\n\n\n\u003e Even if you always had to wait for transactions to be confirmed with\n\u003e some irreversible proof of work (as described in Satoshi's\n\u003e whitepaper), it doesn't follow that \"automatically resolves the\n\u003e Bitcoin experiment as a failure\". I don't understand how can you\n\u003e conclude that.\n\u003e\n\nWhat I said is, if you believe all miners are willing to double spend for a\nfee then this resolves the experiment as a failure. This is also obvious -\nif you can pay miners to go back and rewrite the chain at will, Bitcoin\ndoesn't work.\n\nConsider the incentives. Let's say all miners are \"smart\" in your\nestimation and are willing to double spend transactions for higher fees.\nBecause all miners follow this ridiculous policy, they should be willing to\nfork the chain at any point to claim the higher fee on the new tx. After\nall, although they will throw away the work they did on the previous chain,\nif the fee on the new tx is high enough to balance this then it can be\nprofitable for them to do it.\n\nBecause a double spender can afford to give nearly all of his new tx away\nin fees, this means even txns well buried in the chain can be profitably\ndouble spent: even if the double spender gets back only 10% of the\ntransferred amount, if it was a big transfer for some expensive object,\nthey still win! They got object + 10%\n\nDo you see now why your definition of honesty is completely broken?\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140424/65f8c640/attachment.html\u003e"}