On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Alessandro Parisi <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree with Ittay: when bugs are found, they must be fixed ASAP, expecially > when they affect a sensitive sw such as Bitcon; in IT security, every flaw > that is exploitable in abstract, is going to be exploited in real, sooner or > later, also taking into account the increasing parallel computing power; > beware of false sense of security
That is quite ignorant. Bitcoin is far more complex than standard IT security "fix ASAP" mantra. Distributed consensus is a new field of computer science, and blindly applying standard logic to bitcoin will quickly result in large problems. Every fix has the chance of changing the game theory or economics of bitcoin. A change to the core consensus protocol within bitcoin -- mining -- is even more game-theory- and economically-critical to the core system. Changes thus have more impact, where any change potentially reduces bitcoin's value to zero in the worst case. Bitcoin is akin to medical device or avionics software. We cannot just change at will, without significant research, analysis and testing. "It is a bug, it must be fixed ASAP" is ignorant and dangerous. Further, this is at present a THEORETICAL problem, and the solution presented has some obvious flaws, that would make our current, WORKING SYSTEM more fragile, and less secure. -- Jeff Garzik Senior Software Engineer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
