{"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:2014-04-23\n📝 Original message:On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Gregory Maxwell \u003cgmaxwell at gmail.com\u003e wrote:\n\n\u003e Hm? I didn't think this is at all what they did.  What they claim to\n\u003e do is to prioritize transactions in their mempool from people who pay\n\u003e them\n\u003e\n\nThat's the definition of a Finney attack, right? A tx is broadcast and\nnodes normally take the first one they saw, allowing you to measure\npropagation and use double spend alerts to get pretty good confidence,\npretty quick. A Finney attacker doesn't do that and includes a double\nspend, so the one in the mempool gets overridden.\n\nI mean, I hope that's the definition of a Finney attack, given that I\ncoined the term :)\n\n\n\u003e I think we have very clear evidence that the Bitcoin community doesn't\n\u003e care if miners reorder transactions in their mempool to profitable\n\u003e ends: In https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0 it's\n\u003e demonstrated that GHash.IO, currently the largest publicly identified\n\u003e pool was used to rip off Betcoin dice via double-spends.\n\u003e\n\nYes, very disappointing. Though I'd hope that if this sort of thing was\nsustained over months and merchants started dropping Bitcoin as a result,\nminers would pay more attention.\n\nRight now I suspect miners don't pay attention to anything other than\nhardware builds though.\n\nYes, Bitcoin is imperfect at stopping double spends today. It can certainly\nbe improved! There are plenty of oft-discussed measures like double spend\nalerts and discouraging Finney-attack blocks as was debated extensively in\n2011. This thread is just a third such proposal.\n\nMore importantly, it's possible to deploy technological approaches to\n\u003e make zero-conf very secure against reversal: Things like performing\n\u003e multi-sig with a anti-double-spending system\n\u003e\n\nThese sorts of proposals are all just ways of saying block chains kind of\nsuck and we should go back to using trusted third parties.\n\nThat may well be how the Bitcoin experiment ends, but I think we all agree\nhere that block chains and decentralised consensus are quite spiffy and we\nshould try hard to make them work as well as possible before just shrugging\nand say \"find a trusted third party\". Otherwise why not just go back to\nusing MasterCard? Any TTP that enforces anti double spending rules will be\na lot more centralised than miners, given the difficulty of finding them,\ntheir need for a strong brand/reputation, and the difficulty of getting\neveryone to agree on them.\n\nNot to mention that this solution makes Bitcoin sound like a joke currency.\nIt's a super duper low fee totally decentralised financial system .....\nunless you want to buy something in, you know, a shop. And walk out. Then\nyou need to sign up with this company that looks suspiciously like a bank,\nand pay their fees, and yeah there's like 3 to pick from. Totally\ndecentralised!\n\n\n\u003e Doubly so because a 'nasty' party with non-trivial hash-power can\n\u003e doublespend their own transactions\n\u003e\n\nIf a miner is vertically integrated and defrauding merchants themselves,\nwith no service component, pretty quickly people would talk to each other,\nnotice this pattern and stop trading with them, making their coins rather\nuseless. Also if their real identity is ever revealed they could be liable\nand there'd be a lot of people wanting to sue them.\n\nSo I think the ability to resell double spending to lots of different\npeople around the world seems important to practicality.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140423/06e5e291/attachment.html\u003e"}