3 ms·

Bitcoin is not proven to be effective/secure. SHA1 could be broken.

• davidgerard 10y ago
  That's not really the threat model - Bitcoin isn't secured by math, but by economics: the cost of outhashing the rest. Bitcoin's natural recentralisation has resulted in a few large mining pools controlling most of the hashing power, with at least one having gone over 50% before already. The maths is still basically fine, but it's the least of the possible issues with Bitcoin.
• c0achmcguirk 10y ago
  Bit bitcoin uses SHA256, not SHA1. SHA256 is much more secure. As an aside, even if SHA256 were vulnerable like SHA1 is (in extremely contrived circumstances) the amount of effort to present an alternative, false block would be harder to pull off than a 51% attack. It would cost billions of dollars and would allow the attacker to do a double spend. Again, big whoop. Millions of dollars to do a double spend--it's not worth it.