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The importance of unique bitcoin payment addresses is overstated. What Baidu is doing is fine, in my opinion, if their transaction volume is low. I think it is
by drcode 13y ago
The importance of unique bitcoin payment addresses is overstated. What Baidu is doing is fine, in my opinion, if their transaction volume is low.
I think it is perfectly safe to have a single address and for someone to say "Hey, I just sent 66.32 btc to your payment address."
In the one-in-a-thousand chance that someone else claims to have sent that money as well, you can just ask the sender to sign a message with the source address' private key.
Still, I agree long term you'd save yourself extra work by setting up separate payment addresses.
- 3pt14159 13y agoBut it is public, all I have to do is be the first one to say that I sent them the money.
- drcode 13y agoYes, but Baidu Jiasule is an anti-DDOS system- If someone else comes along five minutes later and says they were wronged, you can just switch it over to the new person... There'd be nothing to gain by trying to cheat.
- nwh 13y agoHow do you prove who was right? You can't if the user isn't able to sign the address, in which case it just becomes a communication race condition.
- nikolak 13y agoYou could ask the user via email to send some small, but "unique", amount of bitcoin from that same address again and then refund it after you've verified that the person emailing you is indeed owner of that bitcoin address.
- drcode 13y agoWhy would a user not be able to sign the address? Every wallet I'm aware of lets you prove you originated a transaction by signing against the originating address.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- GauntletWizard 13y agoIs that really the cryptosystem people are using? Generate a new private key for each transaction? Even with as cheap as generating keys has gotten, and as large as the pool of unique bitcoin addresses is, that just doesn't scale. It's a management nightmare. Your system is far saner; Send the payment, send a message tying the address of the payment to the transaction. Only ever requires one key, way less susceptible to weird timing attacks.
- betterunix 13y agoBitcoin has much deeper issues as a cryptosystem than that. There is no actual security definition, just vague concepts about what should not be possible. Even under the vague notion of Bitcoin's security, there is a known, efficient, and technically feasible attack -- at best all anyone can say is that it is an expensive attack, in the low billions of dollars to pull off. Preventing that attack would require half the computing resources in the world to be devoted to Bitcoin at all times.
- VMG 13y agoare you talking about a double-spend attack?
- jedunnigan 13y agoSounds like a 51% attack. But to the subject of the thread: Baidu should be using a Hierarchical Deterministic pub/priv key tree. [1] Increases their financial privacy 10-fold. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0032 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0032
- VMG 13y agoRight, I also meant 51% attack. I'm not sure if he also meant it, because the attack described by betterunix isn't quite what a 51% attack is about.
- 13y ago
- clarkm 13y agoNo, using a unique address for every payment is very important! While it may not affect you personally, reusing addresses is very bad for overall network privacy. It makes entity resolution much easier, and breaks the property of profile unlinkability. You should be treating addresses more like single-use, disposable accounts than longstanding pseudonyms.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoAnd why does this Baidu subsidiary care about this damage?
- drcode 13y agoYou do make a good point about network privacy. If you don't generate unique addresses, you might discourage your customers from wanting to link their coins to your account (even if they have done nothing wrong, just to avoid second-order effects.)