BCH Devs Discuss Securing Instant Transactions With the Avalanche Protocol

[PRIBO247]

Over the last couple of weeks, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community
has been talking fervently about zero-confirmation transactions
and a new pre-consensus mechanism called Avalanche. On
Monday, Openbazaar developer Chris Pacia published a
comprehensive description of the pre-consensus protocol that
could theoretically bolster secure zero-confirmation BCH
transactions.

A Pre-Consensus Concept Called Avalanche Could Bolster Zeroconf BCH
Transactions

Since the hard fork in November, BCH developers have been
exploring an idea called Avalanche, a concept that could
hypothetically add a double-spend protection mechanism to zero-
confirmation transactions. These types of instant transactions are
broadcast to the network before they are confirmed and some
people believe there is still an open double-spend attack vector
for unconfirmed transactions. Essentially, Chris Pacia’s recent
post, called “Making Zeroconf Secure”, describes how the
Avalanche protocol could protect unconfirmed transactions by
having a group of participating nodes come to pre-consensus.
“Avalanche is a new consensus protocol that was first introduced
earlier this year — It provides a novel way for nodes on a network
to choose between two conflicting transactions and come to a
consensus about which one should be included in the next block,”
explained Pacia.
The Openbazaar developer continued:

"Using Avalanche in Bitcoin Cash for
miner coordination provides a very
elegant, decentralized coordination
mechanism that can potentially prevent
miners from accepting double spend
bribes and when combined with double
spend notifications, make zeroconf
transactions very secure."

Proof-of-Work: The Anti-Sybil Mechanism

The developer further explained that each node participating in the
pre-consensus method will query or poll each other in order to
validate the transaction. However, rather than using nodes that
can be easily ‘sybiled,’ the Avalanche system would use the pools
of BCH miners already securing the network. In a sybil attack,
nodes in a network are easily spoofed and the software is hijacked
by a variety of manipulative phony nodes.
“Proof-of-work is used as the anti-sybil mechanism. The miners
of the last 100 blocks form the consensus group and participate in
Avalanche. This is a rolling membership group. Each new block a
new miner is added to the group and the miner who mined block
n-100 gets booted,” Pacia detailed in his post.

The Avalanche discussion heated up even more so when a video
demonstration and a descriptive editorial was published showing
an alleged double-spend vector on the BSV network. A BCH
proponent named Reizu confessed, “I’ve done many double-
spends on the Bitcoin SV network.” Pacia believes the BCH
network, on the other hand, is very close to making zero
confirmation transactions secure. The Openbazaar developer
believes there’s a better solution to the problem than orphaning
blocks and suing people when things go wrong.
“The difference in the quality of research, proposal, and
implementation between BCH and BSV really isn’t even
comparable,” Pacia concluded.

Source : https://news.bitcoin.com