"Whew, wondered where we'd put those 200,000 BTC!"

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Sat Mar 22 20:14:37 PDT 2014


It were write that:

> You are in the same boat of Karpeles and Ulbricht, they also were
> barely able to code some interpreted language and they were overwhelmed
> by the intricacies of the systems they were building. Until they
> finally brought disaster for themselves and everyone that depended
> on them.

True but inevitable.  Humans can design systems more complex than
they can then operate.  The financial sector's "flash crashes" are
one, but only one, public proof-by-demonstration of that fact.  I
predict that the fifty interlocked insurance exchanges for Obamacare
will be another.  It is likely that any cryptocurrency exchange
that is center-free and self-mobile is harder still.  The HTTP
Archive says that the average web page now makes out-references to
16 different domains as well as making 17 Javascript requests per
page, and the Javascript byte count is five times the HTML byte
count.

Above some threshold of system complexity, it is no longer possible
to test, it is only possible to react to emergent behavior.  Even
the lowliest Internet user is involved -- on the top level page for
a major news site, I found 400 out-references to 85 unique domains
each of which is similarly constructed.  If you leave those pages
up, then because most such pages have an auto-refresh, moving your
ass to a new subnet signals to every single advertising network
that you have done so.

--dan




More information about the cypherpunks mailing list