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May 13, 2013, 11:20:28 PM |
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Gavin is correct, this patch is a ridiculous idea. It doesn't matter that anyone could write it at any time, no rational miner will use it.
There are some very odd ideas at work here about economic rationality. Rational does not mean "motivated by short term profit at any cost". The most rational choice for a miner is to do whatever maximises the value of the Bitcoins they're mining. Making it hard to use unconfirmed transactions would very clearly reduce the value of Bitcoin for large numbers of people, meaning fewer merchants, a smaller ecosystem and less demand, which suppresses the exchange rate. As miners have costs in dollars but income in Bitcoins they're very much motivated to maximise the value (and thus utility) of the whole system.
Bitcoin is at heart a system that manages risk. Being in a block doesn't mean "safe" vs "unsafe", re-orgs can cause transactions to become double spent at any time. So to make blanket statements about the safety of transactions is unsound: you cannot justify an assertion like "unconfirmed transactions are unsafe" without providing proof of what you say.
I assert that unconfirmed transactions are safe enough for many users today, and can be made safer in future. As evidence I cite the lack of complaints about double spending from merchants, easily measured by the lack of media coverage of such events. I also cite the wide acceptance of such transactions and the ability to build double spend alerts to increase the trustworthiness of the broadcast channel. I would need to see equally compelling evidence there's a problem to change my mind on that, and if you have to put in large efforts and use arguments like "it's inevitable" then you aren't showing evidence there's a problem, you're deliberately trying to create one from scratch. Not the same thing at all.
John Dillon is indeed a terrible diplomat, I've had him on my ignore list for a while. There are plenty of productive things he could be doing to increase the utility of Bitcoin for everyone, but instead has chosen to focus on controversial changes that if successful would lower Bitcoins overall utility. He thinks he is doing this for the greater good, but this idea is at best controversial and at worst flatly incorrect. If it's truly inevitable he doesn't need to do anything, as it will happen anyway, and he'd avoid annoying a lot of people he might want to work with in future. If it's not inevitable then he's still better off doing nothing. Regardless, I am not worried about this overly much because as I said, I don't believe miners will use it, nor (given the failure rate in the presence of <100% adoption) will end users.
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