Quote from: oakpacific on March 13, 2013, 03:00:12 AM

Quote from: datafish on March 13, 2013, 02:50:28 AM

Quote from: oakpacific on March 13, 2013, 01:06:33 AM

So I think the 6-confirmation recommendation should be changed: tell the merchants to wait for as many as possible if time permits, or if the amount is large.

How about 6 confirmations plus the length of the longest fork difference, which is usually 0 or 1. I think we need an automated fork monitoring system, with red alerts to the devs, miners and merchants when it gets greater than 2 blocks.

There would be no way of knowing whether the longest one is the correct one, i.e., someone mined an orphan block and is immediately rejected, yet the main chain's difference to the orphaned chain will still continue to grow, but the monitoring system is a good idea, if both branches are detected to have two or more blocks, everyone gets an alert, and the merchant will keep requesting new confirmations until one branch stops growing for a certain period of time.

More importantly, if there is ever an orphan chain that appears to have more than a few percent of the hashing power, ALL clients should enter safe mode. The only time we wouldn't want that is if we did an intentional hard fork, but in that case the incompatible ("new") chain should have over 90% of the hashing power