Re: [Bitcoin-development] Payment Protocol Proposal: Invoices/Payments/Receipts

2012-12-23 Thread Elden Tyrell
On 2012-12-21 17:05:21 +, Stephen Pair said:
 Also, identity is one thing, an elaborate trust based identity 
 verification system (like CA's) is a whole other thing.

Your distinction between identity and trust-based identity is one 
of the most important insights to emerge from this thread.  Thank you 
for pointing this out.

 the first task at hand is to implement secure, private messaging... 
 it's easy to do and you don't need to solve the PKI problem.



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Re: [Bitcoin-development] does stubbing off Merkle trees reduce initial download bandwidth?

2012-01-02 Thread Elden Tyrell
On 2012-01-02 14:41:10 -0800, Gregory Maxwell said:
 make this possible: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=21995.0

Neat!  I had a similar idea but you've clearly beat me to [a big part of] it.


 Er, no—  if a node controls the private keys for a transaction, and
 that transaction makes it into the chain then it can safely assume
 that its unspent (at least once its buried a few blocks into the
 chain).

I'm not so sure about that.  If you accept X successor blocks as proof 
that none of the transactions in a block re-used an output, then the 
cost of attacking is X*50BTC since the hashpower needed for the attack 
could have earned that much reward.

However, an attacker could use the same faked X-block sequence to 
attack multiple clients by putting several double-spend transactions in 
the first faked block.  This would spread out the cost over more than 
one attack.  So simply checking that the value of the transaction is 
less than X*50 isn't necessarily enough, although the logistics of the 
attack aren't exactly easy.

There's also the question of knowing what the difficulty for those X 
blocks ought to be.  If the attacker controls your network connection 
(e.g. your ISP attacks you) you wouldn't be able to get a second 
opinion on how high the difficulty ought to be, and might get fooled by 
X very-low-difficulty blocks that were each produced with a lot less 
than 50BTC worth of hashpower.

  - e



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[Bitcoin-development] does stubbing off Merkle trees reduce initial download bandwidth?

2012-01-01 Thread Elden Tyrell
Satoshi's paper mentions that storage requirements for the blockchain 
can be reduced by deleting transactions whose outputs have been spent.

If I understand correctly, this technique can only be used for reducing 
*storage* requirements, not *bandwidth* needed for the initial chain 
download by a high-security client that doesn't trust any of its peers 
-- right?

The rule is trust the longest valid chain of blocks.  Part of a block 
being valid is that each transaction's inputs are unspent and their 
sum exceeds the transaction's outputs unless it is a coinbase.  This 
cannot be verified for stubbed out transactions -- they have outputs 
but no inputs, and aren't coinbases.  So a paranoid client booting up 
for the first time needs to be given an un-stubbed chain, right?

Of course, if a client decided to accept a stubbed blocks only when the 
sum of the difficulties in the blocks after it exceeds some number N, 
then attacking it could be made very expensive by picking a large 
enough N.

Please let me know if I have misunderstood something.



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