How to fix malleability? Use Bitcoin as cash

Bitcoin (BCH) works best when used as a cash system. After all, it is designed to work as one.

In a new blog post, nChain chief scientist Dr. Craig Wright addressed transaction malleability—the new-old issue that negatively affects the perception of cryptocurrencies as it is believed to create problems for the network. Transaction malleability allows someone to change a transaction’s unique ID before it’s confirmed on the network, making it possible for the person to pretend that the transaction didn’t happen.

Complicated proposals have been made to “fix” this issue. SegWit, for instance, promises to solve transaction malleability by not “taking into account signatures when calculating the transaction’s fingerprint.” But why settle on complex and convoluted methods, when the answer is simple: use Bitcoin as a cash system.

“Once we move past the unfounded FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] that has been oversold as a scaling issue (and seems more to be a method to extract value from Bitcoin into Alt-Coins) we start to see that Bitcoin was designed to work as cash and when it is used this way, it works best,” Wright said.

Bitcoin was designed with the idea of splitting and re-joining transactions in mind, according to Wright. The concept can be read in Section 9 of the Bitcoin whitepaper, which states that “fan-out, where a transaction depends on several transactions, and those transactions depend on many more is not a problem here.”

“Why are we seeking to make more difficult ‘solutions’ when a far superior method exists right now and was incorporated from the start into Bitcoin?” Wright said. “Malleability does not need a fix to stop this occurring. The nature of Bitcoin is to not require the use of third parties, so why are many people doing their utmost to make third parties a part of Bitcoin?

Read Dr. Wright’s blog post, “Spending the simple way in Bitcoin Cash,” here.