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Perhaps you do not understand it's revolutionary aspects.
by hossbeast 9y ago
Perhaps you do not understand it's revolutionary aspects.
- pishpash 9y agoNothing revolutionary about distributed consensus. It was the 2008 financial crisis that brought the anti-banking crowd into frenzy, seeing all sorts of claimed benefits in using this sort of thing for money. They would have been goldbugs or tulip collectors under other circumstances. Or do you mean the revolutionary scamming techniques never seen before? /s
- tylersmith 9y agoTrustless Byzantine fault tolerant decentralized consensus as long as < 50% of participants are not acting in concert. That _is_ revolutionary.
- amscanne 9y agoNot consensus, probabilistic consensus. And not 50% of participants, 50% of computing power. Those are critical distinctions.
- darawk 9y agoBut distinctions that make it no less revolutionary.
- pishpash 9y agoProbabilistic consensus was not known before bitcoin? Somehow I highly doubt it.
- kolinko 9y agoOne that was resistant to sybil attacks? Bitcoin was the first system to do that as far as I know. Before bitcoin you would be unable to create a virtual currency without a central authority. Satoshi's algorithm was a new invention in 2009, although it's parts - like proof of Work - were invented in 1990s.
- darawk 9y agoProbabilistic, byzantine fault tolerant consensus was absolutely not known before Bitcoin.
- eternalban 9y agoExactly. Consensus by brute force. It is a curiously anti-democratic design.
- JohnStrange 9y agoBitcoin and other crypto coins are a neat idea until their underlying cryptographic primitives are broken. Then they will immediately loose all of their value. Every cryptosystem of the past has been broken at some time.
- loblollyboy 9y agoBitcoin has problems but I really don’t think that is one of them https://www.quora.com/Has-the-Bitcoin-blockchain-itself-ever-been-hacked https://www.quora.com/Has-the-Bitcoin-blockchain-itself-ever...
- oarsinsync 9y agoIndeed. The coin is only as strong as it's cryptography, and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken. Until that happens, there's still money to be made!
- tatersolid 9y ago> and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken Not all ciphers... 3DES and GOST have no practical breaks after 40 years of cryptanalysis (all attacks have > 2^100 time or memory complexity) Any secure modern 256 bit symmetric primitive is likely safe from large quantum computers. What will continue to be be broken are encryption protocols and systems that misuse modern secure 256-bit primitives. So we will continue to see things like the BEAST attack because non-cryptographers continue to invent their own encryption protocols with alarming frequency.