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You 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
by rspeer 8y ago
You 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.