Bitcoin Believers, Guzzling the Flavor-Aide
I haven't mentioned it recently, or at all, but a few months ago I spoke with a Bitcoin guy. He was my first, a tecky by trade who really believed in the Bit.
I asked him what the appeal was. For him, it was to take control of money in ways that separate it from people. ( Things proceeded to weird. )
I asked him what the appeal was. For him, it was to take control of money in ways that separate it from people. ( Things proceeded to weird. )
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That feeling doesn't seem very well-informed.
At the very lest, it's equivocating between the security of a system and the security of individual pieces of software. Take HTTPS for example. Your web browser is about "as hackable as any other software"; if I trick you into installing the right malware I can read your email and steal your bank password, HTTPS or no. But that doesn't mean the HTTPS protocol itself "just as hackable" as whatever ( ... )
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For all I know, Bitcoin might be as un-hackable as tally sticks. That would be good. Tally sticks, though, are pretty easily created with a stick and a knife, where Bitcoin requires more sophistication just to start. And internet. And electricity.
Bitcoin probably would be easier to bootstrap back to existence than most electronic finance infrastructure....
Good to know.
Gold already exists, goldbugs are nothing new.True, but moving gold is difficult. There are some providing physical specie security (gold in a remote vault) and secured transaction electronic transfers (people trading possession of remote vaulted gold), but these are proprietary, so the mechanism cannot be verified as to quality ( ... )
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I'm getting the possibility of hacks from dystopian sci-fi
There's some risk to generalizing from fictional examples.
any system must be easily understood to be verifiable, but any system that is so easily understood presents its security flaws
The first part is certainly true (especially if by "easily understood" you mean "by people with the technical background to understand that sort of thing"). The second part is not quite true, which is why cryptography works at all; it relies on a family of mathematical functions that are easy to understand but still provably hard to reverse.
True, but moving gold is difficult. There are some providing physical specie security (gold in a remote vault) and secured transaction electronic transfers (people trading possession of remote vaulted gold), but these are proprietary, so the mechanism cannot be verified as to quality.
My first reaction to this comment is to say that moving gold is not that difficult, relative ( ... )
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True; there is, however, a corresponding risk to discounting yet unrealized possibilities as merely fiction. ;-)
More seriously, think of the myriad examples of people who built a secure situation and, simply because they could not fathom a method of breach yesterday, failed to update the security for tomorrow. The Maginot Line comes to mind.
...which is why cryptography works at all....
My point in addressing the security of cryptography is to note the pace at which current computing makes all cryptography less and less secure. That's why I mentioned Gibson; given computing which is here but just not yet that accessible (quantum comes to mind), an uptick in availability would crack current security (if that hasn't already happened; remember that one Vault episode?).
I'm not sure what you mean by this exactly. I can think of a few interesting things you could mean, but I don't want to respond to a guess.Completely coincidentally, I heard a TED talk about block chain ( ... )
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