Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Point of Attack: Miners can steal from retail
by
justusranvier
on 18/04/2013, 23:11:19 UTC
As far as preventing it, once we are in a world with no block subsidy, merchants can chain the fees for currently unconfirmed transactions in such a way that the longer it takes the attacker to find a block, the more fees they would be forced to give up because the fees were dependent on the transaction that was double-spent.
For that matter, mining pools could offer double spending protection on a subscription basis.

All a merchant needs is to positive confirmation from a large enough fraction of the hashing power that a conflicting transaction will not be included in a block. The size of the fraction needed is just enough that it would be uneconomical for an attacker to attempt a double spend for the size of a given transaction.