The first question every blockchain-literate reader asks: no mining rewards — then what secures this? The answer is that Tunnels is not secured the way Bitcoin is, because it is not protecting the same thing.
Bitcoin's chain is the money itself; forging the chain steals the coins. So Bitcoin makes writing history physically expensive — proof-of-work funded by minted coins. The burn is the security, and inflation pays for it. Tunnels deliberately outgrew that method: the burn costs money the protocol has no way to pay (no token, no rewards, no fees — by rule), and the method creates nothing here, because a Tunnels block is not money. It is a record about work whose value lives outside the chain.
Tunnels' security therefore lives at the transaction layer, paid in accountability rather than electricity:
- Cryptography: only a contributor's key can attest as them. Forgery does not yield to hash power at any scale.
- Economics: every attestation is backed by a bond and exposed to a challenge window. Inflated claims are cheap to dispute and expensive to lose.
- Reputation: identities are permanent and non-transferable. Every claim stakes a history that cannot be bought, sold, or reset.
Blocks retain one job: placing finished work in permanent order. Production is event-driven — a transaction's acceptance triggers the block that carries it — and per-transaction proof-of-work (small, self-adjusting, paid to no one) throttles spam. That is the part of Bitcoin's method that still serves a contribution ledger, and the only part retained.
The trade, stated plainly: Tunnels gives up brute-force resistance to history reordering, which for Bitcoin would be fatal. Here, a reorderer gains almost nothing: signatures cannot be forged, nothing can be minted, and every honest node rejects invalid history on sight. The realistic attack on a record of work is forgery — and forgery is impossible at any hash rate. Different asset, different threat model, different — and appropriate — defense.
If you discover a security vulnerability in the Tunnels Protocol, please report it by emailing:
Please include:
- Description of the vulnerability
- Steps to reproduce
- Potential impact
- Any suggested fixes (optional)
We will acknowledge receipt within 48 hours and provide a detailed response within 7 days.
This policy covers:
- tunnels-node
- tunnels-core
- tunnels-sdk
- tunnels-wallet
- All other crates in this repository
We ask that you:
- Give us reasonable time to address the issue before public disclosure
- Avoid accessing or modifying other users' data
- Act in good faith to avoid privacy violations and service disruption