Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Reminder: zero-conf is not safe; $1000USD reward posted for replace-by-fee patch
by
TierNolan
on 10/05/2013, 12:37:03 UTC
Also, your comment about blacklisting is really not the same at all (nor feasible).  Zero-conf replacement requires only a few miners to participate for it to make zero-conf transactions pretty much useless in zero-trust transactions.  That's not the same as blacklisting, which needs 100% miner participation to work. 

No, it doesn't even require > 50%.

For example, assume 75% of the miners are profit seeking and 10% of the miners said that they won't build on blocks with any of of transactions for at least 2 blocks.

If you add a block containing one of those transactions, then there is a 10% chance that the alternative miners will get the next block.  Rational miners would then switch to that block, since if it wins, it get 100% of the hashing.  If the other block wins, it still only gets 90% of the hashing, since the "bad" transaction has to be buried two deep.

The effect is that 85% of the miners end up supporting the blacklisting.

Mine a "clean" block
- you get 100% of miners to build on yours

Miner a "tainted" block
- you get at most 90% of the miners to build on yours

If the 10% find another block
- there are 2 equal POW blocks
-- miners following the rules stay on the first block (15%)
-- taint enforcers stay on alt branch (10%)
-- rational miners switch to alt branch (75%)

If the 90% find the next block
-- all switch to that chain

So, if you mine a "bad" block, you have a 10% chance of it being matched by the taint enforcers and then an 85% of it then be superseded.  This gives an 8.5% chance of you losing your tx and minting rewards. 

As long as only a small number of transactions are tainted, it isn't worth including them.

The defense would be to have lots of p2p mixing operations.  If most coins are tainted, then none are.