How does system respond ?
My idea doesn't cover multiple exchanges. It would only work with one. More thought would be needed to extend it to other exchanges if needed. This is what I meant by centralizing around the exchange. So for the 'one true exchange' idea I'd see one order book managing deposits, withdraws and orders. This is the entity doing the checkpointing. Perhaps other 'exchanges' use an API to access the order book and provide functionality on top.
Well, I suspect that the community would treat actual deployment of God-Emperor Exchange even less warmly than it treats large "future development/exotic laundry" premines.
Though I think that Ixcoin could do that with relatively little public relations issues... Maybe we should propose that to the fakepanese guy ?
Well, I'm interested in doing this for Fairbrix. I don't think the community would hate this. With a new currency, you only send coins to the exchanges anyways. So it's not unreasonable for the exchange's view of the chain to be the "right" one in order to prevent an attacker from screwing over the exchange. I'm sure we can come up with things to limit what the exchange can do.
Here are some possible bad things the exchange can do:
- Run its own miners and only accept blocks produce by its miners, thereby reaping all the mined coins
- Do a double spend against its own users. After a user withdraws FBX, the exchange can lock in an different block and reverse that pay out
- Totally kill the chain by locking in a bad block
Somethings we can do is to have the ability to undo a lock. Maybe a kill switch for this block locking functionality. And if the exchange really misbehaves, people will stop using it, and I can always release a new client without this code.
