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Why do proof-of-work fans believe that the only alternative to trusting nobody is trusting everybody? You get out of the proof-of-work mess by trusting one ent
by rspeer 8y ago
Why do proof-of-work fans believe that the only alternative to trusting nobody is trusting everybody?
You get out of the proof-of-work mess by trusting one entity, and it doesn't have to be the government. And to use proof-of-work, you implicitly trust the people who wrote all the code you use anyway.
- coralreef 8y agoNot sure what you mean. How do the people decide who to trust? An individual can be coerced and becomes a single point of failure in the system.
- rspeer 8y agoYour argument against simple verified ledgers was "but the government of Venezuela!". The simple solution is to not put the government of Venezuela in charge of your ledger. Make it require multi-party consensus if you want, to reduce single points of failure. DNSSEC (for all its faults) runs on trusted multi-party consensus [EDIT: apparently not the way I think] and isn't a blockchain. But of course anyone or any set of people can be coerced, including you. That will never not be true. "How do you decide who to trust?" applies to every endeavor in life, so if you want to go do philosophy instead of blockchain, fine.
- coralreef 8y agoPoW solves this by economically incentivizing block production, and thereby creating a cost to anyone that would try to cheat the system. You don't need to trust any party, you trust the math. You said not to put the government of Venezuela in charge of the ledger. But when the government of Venezuela sends armed forces to the offices of your trusted party to confiscate its servers and equipment, what happens to your ledger?
- rspeer 8y agoYes, I know that's the argument for PoW, but PoW completely sucks in every way compared to trusting somebody. If the government of Venezuela takes all your computers and puts you in jail, what happens to your Bitcoin?
- coralreef 8y agoIf I'm in jail, my bitcoin still exists and when I get out, I could access it so long as I've memorized my seed words, or backed them up, or shared them with a family member I trust, who could use it while I'm incarcerated. It is not easily seized, and if you are careful, not easily identifiable. Using trust to secure your ledger is like driving without insurance; sure its cheaper and more efficient, until it isn't.
- rspeer 8y agoYour family member that you trust gave your seed words to the government, under duress. In a world that relies on not trusting anyone, you are screwed no matter what.
- coralreef 8y agoPutting a gun to someone's head will always be a security problem, in any system. In this case, it is not system threatening because no entity has power over the network. I may have relied on my family to keep a password secret, but that affects only me. The government cannot coerce the entire system unless it is prepared to put everyone in jail. Bitcoin lives on, and will not be stoppable. This is the power of a trustless system.
- tptacek 8y agoWhat do you mean by "trusted multi-party consensus"? The TLD zones that actually matter are operated by individual organizations.
- rspeer 8y agoYou know a lot more about this than me, so I'll defer to you. All I meant is that: * there is cryptographic consensus involved * there is no single point of failure Therefore it's a counterexample who people who claim that everything but PoW has a single point of failure. Am I wrong?
- tptacek 8y agoI don't mean to jump on you, but, yes: there are multiple single points of failure in DNSSEC, which is a simple tree-structured PKI, like we had in the 1990s. There's a "consensus" of a sorts between parent and child, but the parent can override it. Whoever controls .COM can, by fiat, sign Google.com records.
- rspeer 8y agoGot it. Would you say that cryptography can create a system where you can trust a set of people, without having to trust one single entity, and without destroying the planet with PoW? And can you give me a better example to use next time? (For what it's worth, I picked DNSSEC because it had a memorable example of a "key-signing ceremony", perhaps the only instance of such a thing I've heard of that wasn't someone launching a blockchain. I realize that DNSSEC sucks anyway.)
- tptacek 8y agoThere's ceremony and some distribution for the management of the root keys. But almost nobody is a client of the root namespace; the most important namespaces are the classic TLDs and ccTLDs. The keys for those are controlled, by and large, by the governments that control those TLDs.