3 ms·

Well, there's a fairly easy work around to this kind of issue. #1: What if your client kept your bitcoins spliced over several addresses ? So, each address kep

by ashray 13y ago

Well, there's a fairly easy work around to this kind of issue. #1: What if your client kept your bitcoins spliced over several addresses ? So, each address kept just 10 BTC. Now, when you make a 99BTC transaction, you use up 10 addresses and 1 BTC change gets tied up for further confirmation. (adjust the numbers as convenient of course) Thus, you basically can't spend your change until 6 confirmations but now it's far lesser than the 9.99 you surmised. #2: (this one's better!) Or what if you just kept 10 separate addresses and used 1 at a time manually ? You'll tie up 1 address for up to an hour but the likelihood of making 10 transactions an hour is fairly low, and if you did want to do that, you could still split and proceed. Entropy for BTC addresses is fairly high and each person on the planet can have far more than 10 so this is a non-issue in terms of availability. Clients could manage these scenarios fairly easily if unconfirmed inputs/outputs were indeed to become a limiting factor.

justusranvier 13y ago
Addresses are one-time payment codes and should never be reused at all under any circumstances. This is how Bitcoin was intended to be used from the beginning, and how it's always been implemented in the reference client, but unfortunately due to a usability bug the most popular wallets these days reuse addresses and are teaching new users this incredibly destructive habit. The problem started in the original client where it generated new private keys randomly. This meant effectively there was no way to implement a sane backup policy. Later on, they implemented the ability to generate private keys in batches of 100. This is better, but still problematic because your backup have to be refreshed after no more than 100 operations. Obviously that was a usability disaster, and so wallet designers worked around that by just using the same private key over and over again. Other people worked out secure deterministic address generation so that you could just backup a single seed once, but by the time that got standardized (BIP32) the damage was already done. Blockchain.info is the most popular wallet, and they've taught about a million newbies to treat single-use payment codes as permanent account numbers. It's a privacy and security catastrophe, but those issues are invisible to most people who only care about ease of use.
- ashray 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. So hang on, what you're saying is that according to the original bitcoin spec, addresses should be single use only ? So that means that this unspent output issue coupled with the confirmation time lag is basically an implementation problem due to the way wallet systems have evolved. It can be a pain to generate a new address for every transaction, even for automated software. I suppose these are the kind of issues that show us that bitcoin is still very much a work in progress and while it's always being worked on, it's still in 'beta'.

by ashray 13y ago

justusranvier 13y ago

Addresses are one-time payment codes and should never be reused at all under any circumstances. This is how Bitcoin was intended to be used from the beginning, and how it's always been implemented in the reference client, but unfortunately due to a usability bug the most popular wallets these days reuse addresses and are teaching new users this incredibly destructive habit. The problem started in the original client where it generated new private keys randomly. This meant effectively there was no way to implement a sane backup policy. Later on, they implemented the ability to generate private keys in batches of 100. This is better, but still problematic because your backup have to be refreshed after no more than 100 operations. Obviously that was a usability disaster, and so wallet designers worked around that by just using the same private key over and over again. Other people worked out secure deterministic address generation so that you could just backup a single seed once, but by the time that got standardized (BIP32) the damage was already done. Blockchain.info is the most popular wallet, and they've taught about a million newbies to treat single-use payment codes as permanent account numbers. It's a privacy and security catastrophe, but those issues are invisible to most people who only care about ease of use.

ashray 13y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. So hang on, what you're saying is that according to the original bitcoin spec, addresses should be single use only ? So that means that this unspent output issue coupled with the confirmation time lag is basically an implementation problem due to the way wallet systems have evolved. It can be a pain to generate a new address for every transaction, even for automated software. I suppose these are the kind of issues that show us that bitcoin is still very much a work in progress and while it's always being worked on, it's still in 'beta'.