Long (long!) time lurker on this list, and Bitcoin early adopter here. I'll try to give a quick summary for Freenet folk:

Assuming no cryptographic flaw is found, I believe (FWIW) that Bitcoin will soon be safe, because all functions are decentralized, including transfer and generation. With some simple steps such as running over Tor, Bitcoin can also be anonymous for spending, receiving, and generating.

The one known attack against Bitcoin, and this is an intentional part of the design, is to have more computing power than the rest of the network combined: When a double-spend occurs, the network as a whole decides which spend occurred first; raw computation power decides this. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the network right now is the equivalent of about 2000 ATI 5970 graphics cards, so that might be $3M or so in hardware costs, which of course is trivial for the government.

But if Bitcoin grows 1000x bigger, or more specifically, the amount of computing power on the P2P network grows 1000-fold, I think it would be safe from government attacks. Here's a graph of computing power ("difficulty") vs time:

    http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Teppy


What is the danger that BitCoin will have the same fate as the "Liberty Dollar"?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Liberty_Dollar#FBI_.2F_Secret_Service_raid

Does this create any risk for Freenet if we are using it?

Ian.

--
Ian Clarke
Founder, The Freenet Project
Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>


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