On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 6:56 PM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wui...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 3:24 AM, Robert Backhaus <rob...@robbak.com> wrote: >> So the decision has been made to make 0-conf double spends trivial, so no >> one will ever trust 0-confs. If a later transaction appears with a larger >> fee, it will be considered to be the valid one, and the first one dropped, >> as long as the first one has not been confirmed. This makes undoing a >> mistaken transaction possible. > This has been suggested, but I know of no such decision having been made.
Indeed. I've argued against it pretty aggressively, but I am starting to find arguments for and against pure fee-based replacement more equally persuasive. Regardless of the eventual outcome, fees today aren't a major motivator vs subsidy and overall network health— and even if some protection isn't 100% there are plenty of cases where the risk is averaged across many small transactions and any reduction of risk is a reduction in operating cost. (No one is going to double spend your soda machine at high speed— so you can like increase your prices by the amount of successful double spends you experience and call it done) On the other hand, it's well established that people underestimate the costs of unlikely risks. More deterministic behavior can result in safer interactions more than _better_ behavior. If we believe that in the long term self-interest will result in pure-fee based replacement being wide spread then it is also good to not build a dependency on behavior that will not last. One point that was only recently exposed to me is that replacement combined with child-pays-for-parent creates a new kind of double spend _defense_: If someone double spends a payment to an online key of yours, you can instantly produce a child transaction that pays 100% of the double spend to fees... so a double spender can hurt you but not profit from it. (and if your side of the transaction is potentially/partially reversible he will lose)... But then again, a race to burn more money is kinda ... odd and even if the benefit of resisting the double spends is only a short term benefit, a short term benefit can be greatly important in encouraging Bitcoin adoption. ... and the long term behavior is far from certain. So at least from my position it's far from clear what should be done here. I've noticed a number of people who seem to be swayed by replace by fee— or at least its inevitability if not value. So even ignoring developers there may evolve a community consensus here regardless of what I think about it. My SO pointed that that the transaction burning race described above sounds like an economists wet dream: it's one of those silly cases they use in experiments to probe human behavior... except it sounds like a possible eventual outcome in systems used by people. Perhaps it would be useful to point some graduate students at this question and see what they can come up with about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
