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Incident Raises Concerns About a More Formal Spec For Bitcoin

Posted by timothy on from the emergent-systems dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Aberrant treatment of transactions by Bitcoin miners has renewed concerns that Bitcoin as a protocol may need a stronger specification. OpenBSD savior and Bitcoin entrepreneur Mircea Popescu raised this issue back in 2013 that the current attitude of "the code is the spec" was introducing fragility and harming Bitcoin's vital decentralization. While a lot of fuss has been made about the maximum blocksize, perhaps formalizing the protocol and breaking the current mining cartel is a more urgent and serious problem. The debate going on resurrects many of Datskovskiy's early concerns about Bitcoin's fragility including mining as a necessary bug, but a bug nonetheless.

3 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Let's call the CEO of Bitcoin! by TheNarrator · · Score: 1, Funny

    We should ask him to get the CTO of Bitcoin to implement the spec and to break his contract with the mining cartel. That will fix everything. /s

  2. Re:How is Bitcoin doing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Serving its purpose: facilitating illegal commerce.

    And terrorism.
    And financial instability.
    And slowing economic growth.
    Probably pedophilia too.
    And racism.
    And Trump.
    Did I leave anything out?

  3. Re:How is Bitcoin doing? by GLMDesigns · · Score: 3, Funny

    yes. Dice buying slashdot.

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