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

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 13:37:26 +0100

On 1/10/14, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 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.

You don't have to MM from birth. That I've already agreed is
dangerous. But if you start with SHA256, then merged mining is a
trivial fork at least 3 currencies have done successfully.
As said we plan to make Freicoin merge-mineable in the future, and we
expect to get much more security after we do.
The only "adverse" effect may be a temporary drop in price due to the
new miners selling all the frc they get until a new price equilibrates
with the demand. But that's not really "bad for the currency", just to
the holders at that moment.

> 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.

If a system doesn't compensate its miners in a liquid enough way, the
system will probably be insecure, but that's another topic...