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Researchers Locate Flaw In Bitcoin Protocol
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research and Cornell identified a potential flaw in Bitcoin's transaction propagation. In a recent paper they show how miner nodes in the Bitcoin network have an incentive not to relay transactions to the rest of the network, and propose to implement a scheme that rewards nodes [PDF] for relaying messages."
You're the guy that said he worked in marketing yesterday. Why is it that all UIDs over 2,000,000 seem to do marketing for MS?
which is totally what she said
Only a small fraction of bitcoin nodes (e.g. 1%) are mining nodes, and they all relay transactions as relaying transactions is very cheap to do. The problem they're describing clearly does not exist. If it did someday turn out to be an issue you can address it by users handing their transactions directly to various miners, you don't need some crazy complicated reward scheme.
It's also not news— their contribution isn't insight on incentives but a complicated sibyl resistant reward scheme for trees (which the bitcoin network is not) which requires doubling the cost of forwarding a transaction every two hops it takes. (By making every node perform a great many additional cryptographic signatures and checks in order to track the reward)
If a LARGE proportion of bitcoin nodes are run by assholes who refuse to distribute transactions then the network may fall apart.
This system seems to add a lot of complexity to solve something that has not proven a problem.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
when you wrote "denial" did you mean "in a discussion involving several dozen people, one participant denied the existence of the problem while everyone else discussed whether the flaw is a practical problem or how it could be solved"?
Understandable typo, the keys are right next to each other.
If people stop mining bitcoins now, the people at the top will stop winning, so of course they are going to deny. You know, kind of like global warming
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver and that analogy has covered the floor in so much water that it is like a really tricky crossword puzzle.
SJW n. One who posts facts.