[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

rysiek rysiek at hackerspace.pl
Sun Jul 20 08:45:20 PDT 2014


Dnia niedziela, 20 lipca 2014 02:21:21 grarpamp pisze:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 4:02 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> >>But none of them will have the property that their currency is not
> >>under their control. Other than the obvious head start bitcoin has
> >>in the digital currency game, that is what bitcoin offers
> >>philosophically... freedom from control.
> >>
> > I realize that's the theory, but in reality, there is a mining pool
> > that could easily grow to be more than half of all the miners, at
> > which point it could start ignoring blocks from outside the pool,
> > which would be to the benefit of people inside the pool.  So long as
> > the cost of joining the pool remained small, e.g., if you join you
> > still get 98% of the coins you mine, this looks to me like it would be
> > a stable situation, no matter how much outsiders complained about how
> > awful it was.
> 
> Thing is, having seen the possibilities, people actually *want*
> this freedom from central control, in a bad way, and they're willing
> to act to get it. They also realize that if they, and the entire
> community, don't act together to maintain the decentralization they
> have... then it's over. That's why ghash.io (the largest pool) just
> announced that they will not exceed 40%. Down from 55% to 32% now...

While I applaud ghash.io's self-regulation (!), I do not in general believe in 
self-regulation. "We promise we will not abuse the system" only works as long 
as the payout from having the system not collapsing is (by the self-regulating 
potential abuser) deemed higher than the one-off payout from collapsing the 
system and running away with the spoils.

This is not a good base for a monetary system, I'd say. ;)

-- 
Pozdr
rysiek
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