Re: [bitcoin-dev] How to preserve the value of coins after a fork.

From: Nick ODell <nickodell@gmail•com>
To: bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] How to preserve the value of coins after a fork.
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2015 16:13:56 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANN4kmfYwvWm=iE9f5iqp=tNwXLZbuhNHzoGuoqyHL-uU7ZKAA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E89CCB0E-8EA8-46E0-90C2-C2F80B51C894@petertodd.org>

Emin,

I have two technical criticisms of your proposal, and one economic criticism.

>Unified miners would make sure that they mine transactions on Dum first, then on Dee. Recall that Dee miners can always just take Dum transactions and stick them in their blocks.
This seems to contradict a later section that says that users can use
Dee natively, without paying fees necessary to get a transaction into
Dum. You can't have this both ways - either you can get a transaction
into Dee without getting it into Dum first, or you can't.

>Such an attack would be quite visible, and it would leave Dum vulnerable. Unified clients could counter this launching a 51% counterattack on Dum.
What if some other group that wants to hurt both Dum and Dee were to
make a false-flag attack against Dee? Mutually assured destruction
doesn't work if you can't accurately attribute attacks.

>This would create some gentle pressure to explicitly unify the two chains (by merging Dee and Dum at some compromise and doing away with Unified)
I don't think a compromise would be reachable at that point - suppose
one had a market cap of 1.2 billion, and the other had a market cap of
0.8 billion. How would the coins on the unified chain be distributed?
You could give each chain an equal number of coins, but that's not
fair to the people holding the more valuable coins. You could give
each chain a number of coins proportional to the market cap, but that
invites price manipulation. In any case, if you had a way of reaching
compromise, why not use it instead of creating two chains?

Overall, I think this proposal is a bad idea.

>You seem to not be familiar with how multisig transactions on Bitcoin work - 99.9% of the time theyre hidden behind p2sh and there is no way to know what keys are involved. Equally, multisig is just one of many complex scripts possible.
That doesn't end up mattering, though, as I understand his proposal.
The unified client would just see that both validly spend an output
with a scriptPubKey of OP_HASH160 0xabcdef... OP_EQUAL.

On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
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>
>
> On 30 December 2015 12:22:43 GMT-08:00, "Emin Gün Sirer" <el33th4x0r@gmail•com> wrote:
>>On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org> wrote:
>>
>>> Note how transaction malleability can quickly sabotage naive notions
>>of
>>> this idea.
>>>
>>
>>Bitcoin-United relies on a notion of transaction equivalence that
>>doesn't
>>involve the transaction hash at all, so it should be immune to
>>malleability
>>issues and compatible with segwit.
>>
> >From the post, two transactions are equal if they "consume the same
>>inputs
>>and result in the same outputs, not counting the miner fee. Simple
>>pay-to-pubkey-hash and pay-to-script-hash transactions are
>>straightforward.
>>Multikey transactions are evaluated for equivalency by their inputs and
>>outputs, so it is allowable for a 2-out-of-3 payment to be signed by
>>one
>>set of two keys on Dum and another set of two keys on Dee, as long as
>>the
>>transaction consumes the same coins and produces the same outputs. Not
>>that
>>we'll ever encounter such a case, but making this point helps
>>pedagogically
>>with getting across the notion of transaction equivalence. What counts
>>are
>>the consumed inputs and the destination and amounts of the outputs."
>
> You seem to not be familiar with how multisig transactions on Bitcoin work - 99.9% of the time theyre hidden behind p2sh and there is no way to know what keys are involved. Equally, multisig is just one of many complex scripts possible.
>
> Look into what a segwit transaction hashes - that's a better notion of non-malleable transaction. But even then lots of transactions are malleable, and its easy to trigger those cases intentionally by third parties.
>
> Most likely any Bitcoin United scheme would quickly diverge and fail; much simpler and more predictable to achieve convincing consensus, e.g. via proof of stake voting, or Adam Bank's extension blocks suggestions. (or of course, not trying to force controversial forks in the first place)
>
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