Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] instant confirmation via payment protocol backwards compatible proto buffer extension

From: Daniel Rice <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 08:59:44 -0700

> I'm not sure this is actually important or useful; trusting someone not
to double spend is a pretty binary thing

I think that's true if you assume that the instant provider list is based
on a by hand created list of accepted instant providers. That's how VISA
works now and that's why I was asking for an approach where the
trusted_instant_providers list is scalable because that seems very
dangerous.

Since you can detect when a double spend happens, the entire instant
provider list could be automatically generated based on a 3rd party network
that shares information between vendors and also monitors double spends. In
that scenario, there is no hand written exclusive list of accepted instant
providers. There is just a database of past history on all instant
providers. That database can be used to give a confidence score for a
specific instant provider for a given transaction amount. In this scenario,
a new wallet company would be able to earn trust over time. If the list is
made by hand, "Bitpay accepts Circle, Coinbase, and GreenAddress for
instant transactions", then new wallet providers have to go around bribing
Bitpay and the other large merchant transaction providers to get on their
instant provider list.

Allowing more than one instant signature on a transaction is supposed to
help avoid that scenario. For example, lets say I want to establish my own
instant signature. I use a wallet that already has an accepted instant
signature, but it also allows me to add my own instant signature. I do this
so that I can start establishing trust in my own instant signature while
relying on their instant signature.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:25 AM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:

> - allowing multiple signatures ?
>
>
> I'm not sure this is actually important or useful; trusting someone not to
> double spend is a pretty binary thing. I'm not sure saying "you need to get
> three independent parties to sign off on this" is worth the hassle,
> especially because the first signature is obvious (your risk analysis
> provider or hardware) but the second and third are ..... who? Special
> purpose services you have to sign up for? Seems like a hassle.
>
> But it's up to you.
>
>
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