Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Bitcoin cannot survive on transaction fees alone so why do we even bother?
by
nullius
on 21/12/2017, 05:10:50 UTC
Like I have said elsewhere I am a small blocker (45kb x 3.5 min) so I don't think you can claim I am furthering BCH.  I don't own BCH and I do own BTC.

I am for fairness and decentralization and the free flow of information and what comes from that is more knowledge and more ideas.

Glad to hear it!

A lot of people are talking down to me but none seem to be able to assuage my suspicion that splitting signatures from the UTXO merkle tree hashing will cause big problems since an obvious attack is to just stop verifying the signatures altogether.  If just one person finds this profitable to do then it will spread.  This could be helped by rich rivals in the cryptospace actually writing modified code that allows the miners to do just that, skip verifying signatures which may offer short term gains and long term suffering.  People do this everyday, just ask mcdonalds.

A question you should ponder:  Why don’t miners skip verifying all signatures, altogether?  That could be really profitable.  That way, they could seize and spend Satoshi’s coins!

Oh, wait:  They couldn’t do that, because the resulting blocks would be rejected by nodes as invalid.

But according to you, nothing whatsoever could stop them.  A miner could simply seize Satoshi’s coins with a consensus-invalid transaction, and other miners could build on that chain, and full nodes would be forced to follow along because they have no hashpower—right?

Segwit makes absolutely no difference whatsoever, in this regard.  The signatures are still there; they just got moved around a little bit.  Verification of the signatures is still required by consensus rules.  No substantive change has been made as to the security properties of Bitcoin’s signature verification.