On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > I wrote an article that explains the hashing assurance contract concept: > > https://medium.com/@octskyward/hashing-7d04a887acc8 > > (it doesn't contain an in depth protocol description)
The prior (and seemingly this) assurance contract proposals pay the miners who mines a chain supportive of your interests and miners whom mine against your interests identically. There is already a mechanism built into Bitcoin for paying for security which doesn't have this problem, and which mitigates the common action problem of people just sitting around for other people to pay for security: transaction fees. Fixing the problem with assurance contracts effectively makes them end up working like transaction fees in any case. Considering the near-failure in just keeping development funded, I'm not sure where the believe this this model will be workable comes from; in particular unlike a lighthouse (but like development) security is ongoing and not primarily a fixed one time cost. I note that many existing crowdfunding platforms (including your own) do not do ongoing costs with this kind of binary contract. Also work reminding people that mining per-contract is a long identified existential risk to Bitcoin which has been seeing more analysis lately: http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
