> I consider bitcoin, if this is all the security it has, to be garbage proposed by incompetents.
A fairly strong reaction to a new idea. If it is truly garbage, it will come to naught. But if not, perhaps there is something to be learned. Duane On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Warren Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > >As Satoshi's original Bitcoin paper showed, it becomes exponentially > improbable that any attacker controlling less than 50% of the total CPU > power could manufacture a verifiable chain that is longer than the longest > one that is produced collaboratively by the P2P network. > > --I'm pretty unfamiliar with bitcoin but I consider this "security > guarantee" to be pretty > worthless. If I join an e-money scheme, then dammit I do NOT want to > be cranking > my computer day and night in a a desperate battle to stay secure by > expending more cycles than the bad guys. I want to do some > computation ONCE whenever I get or pay some money, then stop forever, > and I still want permanent security against all the compute power in > the universe for the life of the universe. Many cryptographic > protocols, including multiparty and voting and e-money protocols, > already exist with the level of security I just described (under the > usual assumptions, such as integer factoring is way hard). > > It is quite plausible in a bitcoin scheme with a million participants, > that some "bad guy" team will spend an enormous amount of computing > 24/7 in parallel trying to break it, while meanwhile the "good guys" > do nothing with their computers because they are interested in using > their computers for other purposes. Or in turning them off. > > I consider bitcoin, if this is all the security it has, to be garbage > proposed > by incompetents. > > > > -- > Warren D. Smith > http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking > "endorse" as 1st step) > and > math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html<http://math.temple.edu/%7Ewds/homepage/works.html> > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info >
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