[bitcoin-dev] BIP Proposal: Compact Client Side Filtering for Light Clients

[Andreas Schildbach]

Most SPV wallets make it quite clear that unconfirmed transactions are
just that.


On 06/19/2017 06:36 PM, adiabat via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> This has been brought up several times in the past, and I agree with
> Jonas' comments about users being unaware of the privacy losses due to
> BIP37.  One thing also mentioned before but not int he current thread
> is that the entire concept of SPV is not applicable to unconfirmed
> transactions.  SPV uses the fact that miners have committed to a
> transaction with work to give the user an assurance that the
> transaction is valid; if the transaction were invalid, it would be
> costly for the miner to include it in a block with valid work.
> 
> Transactions in the mempool have no such assurance, and are costlessly
> forgeable by anyone, including your ISP.  I wasn't involved in any
> debate over BIP37 when it was being written up, so I don't know how
> mempool filtering got in, but it never made any sense to me.  The fact
> that lots of lite clients are using this is a problem as it gives
> false assurance to users that there is a valid but yet-to-be-confirmed
> transaction sending them money.
> 
> -Tadge
>