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MIT ChainAnchor – Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin

53 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

RubyPinch 11y ago
"ChainAnchor has been developed for permissioned / private blockchains, and not for the bitcoin blockchain." and the website that only has a small blurb... and the latest draft of their paper on the topic? it seems somewhat absurd to forget to mention that, like as if they were trying to hide the paper or something
- petertodd 11y ago
  FWIW, that draft was added after I published my blog post.
traverseda 11y ago
Regardless of this being chainanchor's goal, do you think this approach would work?
- wmf 11y ago
  Bribing Chinese miners to prevent themselves from using Bitcoin to circumvent capital controls? Sure, why not?
knocte 11y ago
If you can bribe certain actors to corrupt a system, the system is not decentralized enough. I guess this is the consequence of mining centralization (but I have faith that this problem will be solved).
- riprowan 11y ago
  > I have faith that this problem will be solved By what mechanism do foresee this happening (ie. users change PoW, much greater diffusion of mining hardware, order-of-magnitude crash in price, etc?)
  - knocte 11y ago
    Good question. I have a project in mind :)
narrator 11y ago
I love this joke of a proposal. Especially the diagram with the centralized database node. It made me spit out my drink. Why not just run the whole blockchain through a centralized database if you're going to do it that way? Write a web-app with a database backend and some web services and call it a day.
riprowan 11y ago
Bitcoin is like a case study in how profit-seeking creates centralized systems: Start with a system whose explicit goal is to create a decentralized, bottom-up P2P cash. End up with a system governed hamfistedly by a handful of developers and a few ASIC manufacturers and their obnoxious business partners. Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China. SMH
- VMG 11y ago
  > Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China. Why is that a punch line? I don't see the contradiction.
Dowwie 11y ago
I think people need to stop and think about the ChainAnchor project without jumping to stark conclusions about its intent. ChainAnchor is an experiment born in MIT. The project is lead by Sandy Pentland and company, who have a strong record in pursuing rights online. Pentland's group releases papers, as all academics do, to foster peer review. In the case of blockchains and cryptocurrency, practioners like Peter Todd (author of this blog post) could play an important role in that peer review process. However, in this circumstance Todd responded in a public, inflammatory way. Consider for a moment what an entirely academic-led peer review process would be like if controversial papers such as that about ChainAnchor were publicly attacked and its authors humiliated. This would quickly become an unsafe environment to explore and challenge ideas. If academia is to partner with practitioners / experts, both groups are going to need to achieve a mutually beneficial arrangement to advance the field together. This is now a case of what such an arrangement would not look like. for the record-- I currently have no commercial nor academic interests in this subject

53 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

"ChainAnchor has been developed for permissioned / private blockchains, and not for the bitcoin blockchain." and the website that only has a small blurb... and the latest draft of their paper on the topic? it seems somewhat absurd to forget to mention that, like as if they were trying to hide the paper or something

petertodd 11y ago
FWIW, that draft was added after I published my blog post.

traverseda 11y ago

Regardless of this being chainanchor's goal, do you think this approach would work?

wmf 11y ago
Bribing Chinese miners to prevent themselves from using Bitcoin to circumvent capital controls? Sure, why not?

knocte 11y ago

If you can bribe certain actors to corrupt a system, the system is not decentralized enough. I guess this is the consequence of mining centralization (but I have faith that this problem will be solved).

riprowan 11y ago
> I have faith that this problem will be solved By what mechanism do foresee this happening (ie. users change PoW, much greater diffusion of mining hardware, order-of-magnitude crash in price, etc?)
- knocte 11y ago
  Good question. I have a project in mind :)

narrator 11y ago

I love this joke of a proposal. Especially the diagram with the centralized database node. It made me spit out my drink. Why not just run the whole blockchain through a centralized database if you're going to do it that way? Write a web-app with a database backend and some web services and call it a day.

riprowan 11y ago

Bitcoin is like a case study in how profit-seeking creates centralized systems: Start with a system whose explicit goal is to create a decentralized, bottom-up P2P cash. End up with a system governed hamfistedly by a handful of developers and a few ASIC manufacturers and their obnoxious business partners. Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China. SMH

VMG 11y ago
> Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China. Why is that a punch line? I don't see the contradiction.

Dowwie 11y ago

I think people need to stop and think about the ChainAnchor project without jumping to stark conclusions about its intent. ChainAnchor is an experiment born in MIT. The project is lead by Sandy Pentland and company, who have a strong record in pursuing rights online. Pentland's group releases papers, as all academics do, to foster peer review. In the case of blockchains and cryptocurrency, practioners like Peter Todd (author of this blog post) could play an important role in that peer review process. However, in this circumstance Todd responded in a public, inflammatory way. Consider for a moment what an entirely academic-led peer review process would be like if controversial papers such as that about ChainAnchor were publicly attacked and its authors humiliated. This would quickly become an unsafe environment to explore and challenge ideas. If academia is to partner with practitioners / experts, both groups are going to need to achieve a mutually beneficial arrangement to advance the field together. This is now a case of what such an arrangement would not look like. for the record-- I currently have no commercial nor academic interests in this subject