On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Flavien Charlon <flavien.char...@coinprism.com> wrote: >> This breaks existing invariants and would make the coins potentially less >> fungible because they wouldn't be reorg safe. > > I'm not sure coins are ever reorg safe. All it takes is a double spend in > the history of your coins for them to become invalid after a reorg. Because > of that, there are already less fungible coins. This is why we recommend 6 > confirmations for important payments.
I used the word 'less' intentionally. A double spend requires an active action. Roughly 1% of blocks are lost to reorganizations by chance, longer otherwise harmless reorgs as we've had in the past could forever destroy large chunks of coins if descendants had the unwelcome properties of having additional constraints on them. Past instances where the network had a dozen block reorganization which were harmless and simply confirmed the same transactions likely would have caused substantial losses if it reorganizations precluded the recovery of many transactions which were valid when placed earlier in the chain. Additionally your '6 confirmations' is a uniform rule. The recommendation is just a count, it's tidy. It's not a "traverse the recent history of each coin you receive to determine if its script conditions make it unusually fragile and subject to irrecoverable loss", which is the space you can get into with layering violations and transaction validity depending on arbitrary block data. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
