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Bitcoin is set up such that there is no auto-updating feature. Any change to Bitcoin must be accepted manually by all participants. But there's still a questio
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin is set up such that there is no auto-updating feature. Any change to Bitcoin must be accepted manually by all participants.
But there's still a question of "how many people actually review the changelog before updating?" It's a very small number, but that might be okay. If a bad actor pushes malicious code through, all you need is one person to raise the alarm.
In general, Bitcoin is very well reviewed. I don't think it would be easy for a bad actor (even a good actor who is being compelled in secret by a state actor) to push through malicious code. But it's hard to be certain exactly how robust Bitcoin is to this type of thing.
The culture of Bitcoin is highly resistant to changes in the core code. Even optimizations are increasingly scrutinized. Attempts to influence the core devs ("psyops") are also likely to fall flat, simply because the core devs have gone to great lengths to ensure that there is a lot of red tape to making changes, and that larger changes take years to get through with hundreds of eyes of review.
- hudon 6y agoThe fact that changes to Bitcoin Core get some amount of reviews is not enough for all vulnerabilities to get caught, as seen here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... And some of those vulnerabilities may have been planted intentionally, we’d never know.
- Taek 6y agoA lot of the CVE's there are pretty minor. There hasn't been a serious but in Bitcoin core that I know of since 2018, and the one before that was in 2016. Not perfect, but overall I think that's a pretty decent track record.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dfischer 6y agoThat misses the point entirely that most people that actually use bitcoin don’t even use bitcoin core’s wallet. They use other wallets and trust that software and the hardware they are on to be doing the right thing. The average person not only does not understand this distinction, they don’t even know how to validate their own transactions let alone know how to read code.
- darawk 6y agoBut that doesn't matter. The point of Bitcoin is not to provide every single user with perfect decentralization, it's to provide the infrastructure for it so that it can be achieved if its important to you.
- dfischer 6y agoUnfortunately most don’t really understand that and end up just “trusting the software”
- iso8859-1 6y agoYour grandparents talked about "the core technology" and talked about peers. If you're talking about bitcoin in the extended sense that you do, there would be no reason to use these words. It is commonly known that exchanges have to implement KYC/AML and so on, so the question isn't very interesting if we are talking about whether the government has some influence on a web-wallet like Coinbase.
- akritrime 6y agoWhat happens to a participant who didn't update? Will they be on their on special fork of the chain?
- dfischer 6y agoMaybe yes maybe no. It depends on what the updates are.
- ema 6y agoTo expand: an update that puts older versions of bitcoin on a different chain is called a hard fork and it is treated as a big deal. It is supposed to happen as rarely as possible.
- Taek 6y agoThey'll be on the same fork as everyone else who didn't update, which may in fact be the dominant fork.