Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 22:22:48 +0000

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I wrote an article that explains the hashing assurance contract concept:
>
> https://medium.com/@octskyward/hashing-7d04a887acc8
>
> (it doesn't contain an in depth protocol description)

The prior (and seemingly this) assurance contract proposals pay the
miners who mines a chain supportive of your interests and miners whom
mine against your interests identically.

There is already a mechanism built into Bitcoin for paying for
security which doesn't have this problem, and which mitigates the
common action problem of people just sitting around for other people
to pay for security: transaction fees. Fixing the problem with
assurance contracts effectively makes them end up working like
transaction fees in any case.  Considering the near-failure in just
keeping development funded, I'm not sure where the believe this this
model will be workable comes from; in particular unlike a lighthouse
(but like development) security is ongoing and not primarily a fixed
one time cost. I note that many existing crowdfunding platforms
(including your own) do not do ongoing costs with this kind of binary
contract.

Also work reminding people that mining per-contract is a long
identified existential risk to Bitcoin which has been seeing more
analysis lately:
http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf