Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] The insecurity of merge-mining

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 06:25:42 -0500

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 06:11:28AM -0500, Peter Todd wrote:
> > Fair enough.
> > Do you see any case where an independently pow validated altcoin is
> > more secure than a merged mined one?
> 
> Situations where decentralized consensus systems are competing for
> market share in some domain certainely apply. For instance if I were to
> create a competitor to Namecoin, perhaps because I thought the existing
> allocation of names was unfair, and/or I had technical improvements like
> SPV, it's easy to imagine Namecoin miners deciding to attack my
> competitor to preserve the value of their namecoins and domain names
> registered in Namecoin.

Come to think of it, we've got that exact situation right now: the new
Twister P2P Microblogging thing has a blockchain for registering
usernames that could have been easily done with Namecoin, thus in theory
Namecoin owners have an incentive to make sure the Twister blockchain
gets killed at birth.

Pretty easy to do right now too as the hashing power behind Twister is
miniscule and probably will stay that way - the only incentive to mining
is that you get the right to make a "promoted post" - called a spam
message in the codebase - that in theory Twister clients are supposed to
show to their users. Of course, there's absolutely no way to guarantee
that clients actually do that.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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