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From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
To: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Double Spend Notification
Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 06:05:57 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20130521130534.GA27580@tilt> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAAS2fgRCpXUgw=GpE9_AcTgWcdCaDC6_16Xp5+oOZC0_1xmf-w@mail.gmail.com>

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On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 08:54:25PM -0700, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> One point that was only recently exposed to me is that replacement
> combined with child-pays-for-parent creates a new kind of double spend
> _defense_: If someone double spends a payment to an online key of
> yours, you can instantly produce a child transaction that pays 100% of
> the double spend to fees... so a double spender can hurt you but not
> profit from it.  (and if your side of the transaction is
> potentially/partially reversible he will lose)...

You can do better than that actually: you can arrange the transaction
such that the double-spender is hurt by asking them to pay an excess on
top of the initial payment, and having that excess get returned to them
in a subsequent transaction. Of course, that's trusting the merchant,
but you're trusting the merchant to ship to a product anyway so...

A really interesting example for this though would be applications where
you are making a deposit. You credit the customer account immediately
with half of the deposit amount, allowing them to immediately spend that
portion for something transferable. (perhaps an alt-coin) If the
customer tries to double-spend you burn half to fees, still leaving the
other half to pay for what they did spend. If they don't double-spend,
the rest of the balance becomes available after n confirmations. A
BTC->alt-coin exchange could use this mechanism for instance, although
it only works with widespread replace-by-fee adoption; blockchain.info's
shared-send service is another application, as is SatoshiDice. (the
failed bet tx can be the refund)

What's nice here is even if the customer tries to pay a miner to do the
dirty work, a short-term rational miner still has an incentive to screw
over the customer by accepting the merchant's double-spend. Now the
customer can promise the miner future business, but they've shown
themselves to be dishonest... how much honor is there among thieves?

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
00000000000000f31f5cd20f915e3edb8e3fceea49580235b984fea63f1f882c

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2013-05-21 13:06 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2013-05-21  0:45 [Bitcoin-development] Double Spend Notification Quinn Harris
2013-05-21  1:24 ` Robert Backhaus
2013-05-21  1:56   ` Pieter Wuille
2013-05-21  3:27     ` Mike Hearn
2013-05-21  3:39       ` Robert Backhaus
2013-05-21 13:06         ` Peter Todd
2013-05-21  3:54     ` Gregory Maxwell
2013-05-21  4:39       ` Gavin Andresen
2013-05-21  7:04         ` Gregory Maxwell
2013-05-21  8:08           ` Robert Backhaus
2013-05-21 13:05       ` Peter Todd [this message]
2013-05-21 14:26         ` David Vorick
2013-05-21 16:47         ` Quinn Harris
2013-05-21  3:46   ` Quinn Harris

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