On: Leaf-Node Weakness in Bitcoin Merkle Tree Design

[petertodd]

Note that this is a mostly theoretical weakness: the cost to attack is orders of magnitude higher than cost of simply creating fake blocks, which are almost just as good at defauding SPV clients (particularly when you have a pile of money left over by using the cheaper attack!).

Anyway, not many SPV clients actually exist these days - instead it's much more common for "lite" wallets to actually use trusted servers.

[Luke-Jr → petertodd]

It can't actually be used to exploit SPV clients at all, since having even a single destination address puts the transaction over 64 bytes in size.

[tCfD → petertodd]

Then these so-called 'lite' wallets should be referred to with a much more contextually pertinent description such as 'trustful' wallets.

[petertodd → tCfD]

I wish they were frankly. Unfortunately there's endless dishonesty and fraud in the blockchain world in projects denying that their solutions involve huge amounts of trust; that's just a mild example out of many.

[uryga → tCfD]

with a tinfoil hat on, you could say that this is a very convenient rebranding ;)

[onecooldev24 → tCfD]

lite wallets are NOT 'trustful' wallets.