a rather cyberpunky kerfluffle

[solarbird]

Over on Medium, Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn writes about how the Bitcoin experiment has failed.

One of the issues I’ve had with Bitcoin is that there is a 50% threshold of calculations which essentially allow any individual or allied group to take control of the currency processing if they can throw enough hardware at it. At that point, they can do pretty much whatever they want – they have functional control over the currency.

Two groups immediately came to mind when I heard about it – the American NSA and the Chinese government – but there are several groups so capable. And, well – perhaps predictably – that threshold is now hit 100% of the time, according to the article.

And that’s only one of the several extremely serious problems all hitting at the same time.

It’s a good piece, and very much a cyberpunk set of problems, really, with lots of drama, personality clash, censorship – the right author could write a really good novel around this. If you’re interested even vaguely in cryptographic currencies, give it a read.

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Comments

[vatine]

Even funnier, under the right circumstances, you can get by with only 35% of the available "devoted to BitCoin computation" compute power.

[solarbird]

Really? Ugh. What a trainwreck.

[vatine]

Sadly, I can't seem to find the write-up now (I was reading it ca 2012, so...). But to ensure the security of a blockchain in a presumably-hostile environment, you need to control either >50% or >65% of all available compute power. Needless to say, the value of the bitcoins mined need to (at least) be paying for the compute power needed to keep the blockchain safe (not only pay the miner, but pay enough so that the expected bitcoin income is higher than the power used to generate it).

Pair this with with a limited-by-design monetary supply and, well, can I say "grim meathook future"?