Isn't a faster blockchain for transactions (maybe as a sidechain) solving the problem? If there would be a safe way for 0-confirmation transactions, the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn't even be needed.


On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:37 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
Right, this works in the Bitcoin network today absent any collusion by
the miners. You give one miner a transaction and you give every other
node you can reach another transaction.

Yes, but that can be fixed with double spend alerts.
 
Someone you ask to not double spend is an entirely separate matter.
They aren't self-selecting: you select who you trust to not make
double spends and there is no need for this trust to be globally
consistent.

No? It's not just your decision that matters, the receiver also has to trust them. They're like a dispute mediator in this regard. You can pick whoever you want, but that doesn't matter if the receiver doesn't recognise them or trust them. You have to find an overlap to make an instant trade.

In practice if people have to think about this, evaluate brands etc then you'd get a very small number of parties because the value of global agreement is so high. Then it becomes hard to remove ones that have a lot of momentum.

The censorship resistance of the block chain doesn't matter if your double spending partners refuse to help you spend your money (because they're being coerced). The censorship can just happen at a different place.
 
To stop GHash.io we would have to take away their hardware or change the Bitcoin
protocol to make their hardware useless
 
..... or, have a majority decide to zero out their coinbase rewards for blocks that double spent against dice sites. That wouldn't undo the double spend, but you can't do that with the multisig scheme either. All you can do is punish the corrupted party post-hoc, either by not using them again, or by "unpaying" them for the service they did not provide.


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