Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] alternate proposal opt-in miner takes double-spend (Re: replace-by-fee v0.10.0rc4)

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 09:33:53 -0500

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 02:11:31PM +0000, Adam Back wrote:
> My actual point outside of the emotive stuff (and I should've stayed
> away from that too) is how about we explore ways to improve practical
> security of fast confirmation transactions, and if we find something
> better, then we can help people migrate to that before deprecating the
> current weaker 0-conf transactions.
> 
> If I understand this is also your own motivation.

Indeed, which is why I wrote some easy-to-use and highly effective tools
to pull off double-spends and made sure to publicise them and their
effectiveness widely. They've had their desired effect and very few
people are relying on unconfirmed transactions anymore. As for the
remaining, next week alone I'll be volunteering one or two hours of my
consulting time to discuss solutions with a team doing person-to-person
trading for instance.

Like I've said repeatedly, the current "weaker" 0-conf transactions gets
people new to Bitcoin - both individuals and companies - burnt over and
over again because inevitably someone eventually gets motivated and
breaks them, and suddenly they lose stacks of money.

Keeping *that* kind of "security" around rather than depreciating it
ASAP and being honest about what Bitcoin can do does no-one any good.

Anyway, there is no one magic solution to this stuff - the best
solutions vary greatly on the situation.

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