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Beyond Bitcoin: How Business Can Capitalize On Blockchains
snydeq writes: Bitcoin's widely trusted ledger offers intriguing possibilities for business use beyond cryptocurrency, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. "From the beginning, bitcoin has assumed a shadowy, almost outlaw mystique," Wayner writes. "Even the mathematics of the technology are inscrutable enough to believe the worst. The irony is that the mathematical foundations of bitcoin create a solid record of legitimate ownership that may be more ironclad against fraud than many of the systems employed by businesses today. Plus, the open, collaborative way in which bitcoin processes transactions ensures the kind of network of trust that is essential to any business agreement."
MTGOX failure has nothing to do with bitcoin but basic security common sense. Each user should have their own wallet and retain control of it. Putting all bitcoin into a single wallet that you along control clearly show the intent to fraud. The blame lie with the humans, not the technology.
Yes but the technology doesn't protest and it doesn't stand up and defend itself. So the tendency is to blame tech for not being "human-proof" against bad actors, rather than to tackle the much harder problems of how to deal with the reality that in this world there have been and will be bad actors. Perfectly secure tech that can always guard against all bad actors simply doesn't exist - in this case, a simple social engineering attack (convincing people to surrender control that they should never have given up) was all it took. To blame the Bitcoin design for the results of MTGOX is to attempt, yet again, to apply a technical solution to a social problem.
People generally don't blame the bank teller for handing over the money during a stick-up, but banks and bank tellers are something average people understand. What we have is a problem of technical education.
yup
furthermore:
there isn't a technology made by man that cannot also be broken by another man. meaning the technology is never, can never be, a "fix" for human nature. the only real fix to a bad intentioned human is a well-intentioned one. there is no technology that can safeguard against bad intent for you
but wild-eyed technophilia imagines that all the bad and failures of human nature can be overcome with a technological fix. so Mt Gox happens
there is nothing about bitcoin that magically fixes all of the problems with traditional money, even though those problems drive the gullible and naive to bitcoin. every evil you hate about traditional money, is true about bitcoin too. Mt. Gox teaches the most basic failure: simple theft. all of the other, more twisted schemes that have befallen traditional money in the past are still possible too with bitcoin. give it time and see!
the most hilarious part were all those demanding from the japanese government some accountability and protection from the events of Mt. Gox's demise
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/...
"i hate government and regulation, let's use bitcoin!"
(the inevitable happens)
"waaaaaah, please government, help us invesitgate and enforce laws on bitcoin!"
fucking pathetic
they want to escape regulation, government. and then they want regulation, government after they find out what no accountability really means
morons: if people can do bad things to you, they will. only a system of regulation backed by a government can protect you from that. there is no technological fix for that. now: welcome to reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps you giggled because you don't understand it? There hasn't been any flaws with bitcoin itself and the block chain that caused coins to be spent by someone who didn't know the ECC private key... Loss-of-currency has occurred with poor third party implementations, e.g. using ECDSA and selecting the same value of k for multiple signatures (similiar to the mistake made by sony and the ps3) or Mt Gox which was either just outright fraud by the company or a severe implementation error.
The block chain is fairly effective at deciding "what came first" and after several confirmations becomes fairly infeasible for a bad actor to change - I don't know of any weaknesses provided your computing pool is large enough that no person controlls 50%. Well, or a quantum computer solving the discrete logarithm...