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Bitcoin Is Not as Secure, Unregulated, or Lucrative as You Might Think
- general_failure 13y agoThis article is as incoherent as it gets. Money is 'buggy'!? Seriously!!?
- dllthomas 13y agoSeriously.
- dakami 13y agoIf you have a technology (Money) and it doesn't work, it's buggy. You've never had your credit card declined?
- general_failure 13y agoSo what is not buggy in this world ? I can write about anything and call it buggy. Monsoons are buggy since don't arrive on time. Nile is buggy because it floods. Electricity is buggy because it has shock risk. Water is buggy because it can harbor mosquitoes.
- ancarda 13y ago>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it survives. How the Internet is buggy?
- dllthomas 13y agoBecause there's problems in the protocols and bugs in the code that implements them and bugs in the hardware it runs on. A simple example: there are some TCP/IP stacks where the urgent pointer indicates the last byte of urgent data, and some where it indicates the first byte after the last byte of urgent data. Obviously these aren't the same thing, and only one is correct according to the standard, but both kinds of stacks are (I think) still in use. We get around this by basically not using urgent data in our TCP streams.
- UnoriginalGuy 13y agoI am not agreeing with them, and don't like the word "buggy" but several pieces of core internet tech' are broken in various ways. BGP is a "trust" system where you just assume your peers tell the truth and action their routing changes accordingly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents DNS has no spoof protection and due to UDP can be used to DoS third parties by mislabelling your packets and requesting large records. SMTP has no built in way to verify the sender actually works for the domain it claims to work for (see SPF and DKIM as potential workarounds). Everything is being worked on and improved. But the broken stuff is still a large party of the internet today.
- zanny 13y agoNo IP protocol level security (that is widely adopted, IPsec) a top down distribution of addresses. Tacked on mutant growth to fix systemic issues (DNS, NAT, etc). HTML-internet specifically, html is a document markup used for applications and javascript is a browser extension language turned Internet assembly. Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with managing the security).
- UnoriginalGuy 13y agoCan you go into more detail on why you feel HTML is broken? I would have agreed with you back when IE 6 was still a "thing." But these days with strict XHTML, CSS, for appearance/layout, and JS for logic we seem to actually be at a very good place for moving forward. I'd even go as far as to say that XHTML/CSS and JS do a better job separating responsibilities than many programming frameworks I've used do. Do I think they're perfect? No. In fact I hate typeless languages like JS. But it is "good enough."
- dakami 13y agoDuct tape and bailing wire, all the way down.
- AdrianRossouw 13y agoI often wonder how 'real people' would feel if they knew that the internet is built using duct tape and the best of intentions.
- api 13y agoDepends on how you define buggy. IP is vulnerable to all kinds of DOS attacks and weird edge case stuff. Are those "bugs?" Not really, since the spec didn't call for it to be strong against those things, but ... I guess it's a matter of perspective. One thing the Internet does show is that a system doesn't have to be perfect to be robust and incredibly useful. In fact, worse is often better in that way too. If IP were orders of magnitude more complex to deal with all its potential edge cases, it likely would not have been as successful.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- UnoriginalGuy 13y agoThis is an opinion piece. Which is to say don't go in expecting to either learn something new or even to expect a single coherent theme to emerge. It is just a bunch of random pieces of information spliced in with random pieces of information specifically about bitcoins, throw in a link-baity title, and that is this article.
- UVB-76 13y agoAnyone who thinks Bitcoin is the future of money is insane.
- jlgreco 13y agoSuppose I say that I think that bitcoin is the future of currency in the same way that the Benz Patent Motorwagen was the future of personal transportation?
- UVB-76 13y agoBitcoin has no place in the future of currency. The future of currency is digital, but it's not peer-to-peer. It's just an international organisation with a big centralised database. You might not like it, but watch it unfold.
- baddox 13y agoSo "sane" means "able to predict the future with absolute confidence." I guess my lack of certainty makes me insane.
- rubinelli 13y agoA single point of failure for a global currency sounds like an awful idea to me. A federated model, in which each main node has to go through a rigorous appraisal before it joins its peers, and they continuously "trust but verify" each other, is a much more palatable option.
- UVB-76 13y agoCentralisation is the endgame. All transactions will be logged, and all will be instantly reversible in the unlikely event of some kind of security breach. Money laundering will be impossible, and there'll be no incentive to hack other people's accounts because all thefts will be reversible (even if the thief then went on to transfer said currency to third parties)
- zanny 13y ago> There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars (which buy stuff). They are unnecessary if vendors directly accept bitcoin, at which point you can have your wallet, you can be connected to arbitrary nodes in the network, and you can spend the money from that wallet in transactions with any other wallet and verify against only ~8 nodes in the network to verify with reasonable certainty. > It’s all fiat. This is very true, and a lot of people ignore it. Props to the article for making a deal of it. Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good conductor or flaky metal.
- daniel-cussen 13y ago> Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good conductor or flaky metal. That's a stretch. If it were not valuable monetarily, its price would be similar to other difficult-to-extract, heavy metals with a long list of unique properties, like Iridium or Rhenium, neither monetary, and both around $400 an ounce.
- dakami 13y agoWhat's the global supply differential of Gold to Iridium?
- saalweachter 13y agoI would also object to gold being difficult to extract. Gold is relatively scarce, but about 3-10 times more common in the crust (by ppm on Wikipedia) than Iridium, Rhodium or Rhenium. Production of gold was 55 times higher than Rhenium. I don't know if this because of demand or difficulty of extraction. Rhenium is priced at $142/Troy ounce.
- daniel-cussen 13y agoThe $400 figure was the last time I checked--it's a very illiquid market and I remember publicly accessible prices being delayed by months. But rhenium is extracted as a molybdenum impurity, itself an impurity in copper. Most (90%) of it comes from Chile, and the price reflects supply and demand, really. I don't know what the supply elasticity is like, but I suppose suppliers could buy back old copper or molybdenum to purify it if the price warranted it. And because it's an exotic metal, none of the production is artisanal. Gold, on the other hand, has about 25% artisanal production, because mankind has been mining it for thousands of years and the extraction process is simple and well known.
- himzk 13y agoI'd rather have an open outlook to see where it goes. I mean that is exactly we built the best things about the internet till date. By experimenting and having faith. Anyone agrees?
- kzrdude 13y ago> A pallet of $100 bills that disappears in Iraq is a socialized loss against everyone who holds dollars. What? That was tax money. Further, a true destruction of those bills would not be a loss, it would be a gain to everyone else with dollars.
- mcantelon 13y agoMakes me think of Wired's cover story "The Web is Dead". http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/
- tomelders 13y ago> Bitcoin’s got its issues. But it is not competing with perfection. Possibly the most salient and eloquent quote I've ever heard regarding bitcoin.