From satoshi@vistomail.com Fri Jul 6 02:35:11 2018 From: Satoshi Nakamoto To: cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org Subject: Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:35:11 +0000 Message-ID: <172289015849.3849117.17066102595558047158.generated@mail.pglaf.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============7131230428456385196==" --===============7131230428456385196== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable >> As long as honest nodes control the most CPU power on the network, >> they can generate the longest chain and outpace any attackers. > >But they don't. Bad guys routinely control zombie farms of 100,000 >machines or more. People I know who run a blacklist of spam sending >zombies tell me they often see a million new zombies a day. > >This is the same reason that hashcash can't work on today's Internet >-- the good guys have vastly less computational firepower than the bad >guys. Thanks for bringing up that point. I didn't really make that statement as strong as I could have. The requireme= nt is that the good guys collectively have more CPU power than any single att= acker.=20 There would be many smaller zombie farms that are not big enough to overpower= the network, and they could still make money by generating bitcoins. The sm= aller farms are then the "honest nodes". (I need a better term than "honest"= ) The more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, the higher the bar g= ets to overpower the network, making larger farms also too small to overpower= it so that they may as well generate bitcoins too. According to the "long t= ail" theory, the small, medium and merely large farms put together should add= up to a lot more than the biggest zombie farm. Even if a bad guy does overpower the network, it's not like he's instantly ri= ch. All he can accomplish is to take back money he himself spent, like bounc= ing a check. To exploit it, he would have to buy something from a merchant, = wait till it ships, then overpower the network and try to take his money back= . I don't think he could make as much money trying to pull a carding scheme = like that as he could by generating bitcoins. With a zombie farm that big, h= e could generate more bitcoins than everyone else combined. The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to g= enerating bitcoins instead. Satoshi Nakamoto --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- --=20 Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE --===============7131230428456385196==--