3 ms·
What stops someone from sending (large number) of transactions which each spend less than $YYY at any one time, but total much more than their balance? If you
by drdeca 5y ago
What stops someone from sending (large number) of transactions which each spend less than $YYY at any one time, but total much more than their balance?
If you have an actual person named and you have their street address and whatnot, you (rather, the bank) can hold them accountable for the missing money using like, laws and courts, but, if this is all pseudonymous internet money, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse?
So, in that case, the case where you have no recourse if they don’t actually have all that they’ve paid, it is important to be able to verify their current account balance including all transactions they’ve made so far, not just ones that have already been fully processed (or at least, be able to provide the good or service in a way that only takes effect insofar as they end up actually having enough money to pay).
If you could somehow limit the number of transactions they are capable of making in the given amount of time, what you said could work, but I don’t see how to achieve that?
I guess maybe if the computational cost of making a transaction was large enough, you could make the limit on the size of individual transactions small enough that they couldn’t produce enough to use their whole balance within the allotted time period, because they don’t have enough computational resources?
But then how do you know how much computational resources they have?
Seems like this could result in mining farms being able to spend more than they have.
Though, if this attack was only possible with a large hardware investment, one could still detect the attack afterwards, and just, delete the money spent this way?
Oh, or, if one can’t spend money that one got since the previous periodic amount of time, needing to wait until the next signed message from the bank, then, there would be no transactions that are only seemingly valid because of the invalid ones,
and so, then you just have people not getting the money they were expecting,
But if the only way this can happen is if someone makes a really big number of transactions, then probably many of the recipients were in on the scheme, and so them not getting the money is maybe fine??
Hm. But not clear how you could determine which ones were in on the scheme and which ones would be unfairly harmed by not getting the money they were promised.
Though, if you are going to have a bank centralizing things, why not just, send the transactions through the bank? Are they any more of a middleman when they process the transactions as part of the paying the money instead of later?