Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
This thread proposes a method for miners to promise "that their next block/s will contain a specific transaction", and/or that "they won't mine a conflicting transaction".
If adopted by a large percentage of miners, this method is supposed to enable "relatively safe" 0-confirmation transactions (well, safer than today at least).
If wildly adopted, could this work?
This could work in most situations, as long as the pool is trustworthy. However, the whole notion of "relatively safe" 0-confirmation transactions can still be risky if there are any miners that want to be malicious. For example, if one was to accept such transactions, and someone wanting to exploit their trust by double spending and trying to mine their own block with only the second transaction. Even if 99% of the pools would confirm the transaction, the one that wouldn't could cause a lot of problems if exploited by malicious party. Combating such a rogue pool would also be hard if one wants to avoid forks in the blockchain (for example, by rejecting blocks without a given transactions).
In short, this approach offers slightly more security, if widely adopted it can work as intended, but it is not 100% attack-proof.
I don't think it helps much. The biggest real threat is the Finney attack, and the Finney attack is just as big a threat even with such a promise.
