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Incident Raises Concerns About a More Formal Spec For Bitcoin
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.
As opposed to every other currency in the world, ever.
It's always entertaining to see the latest episode of 'Bitcoin: rediscovering the reasons behind the various messy hacks that we dislike about more typical currencies...'
It already has reached its (current) limits - you can currently wait up to an hour to have your transaction written into the block chain, which means that at any time during that period the buyer can withdraw the transfer, so you have to delay handing over products until the transaction has actually been written into the block chain.
Can you imagine having to wait an hour before you can leave the supermarket if Visa didn't authorise a transaction right away?
Why is group mining even a thing?
It seems to be the source of most buttcoin problems.
Why not rip it out entirely and change the spec around to balance singular nodes?
Or put a max nodes per group in effect.
Yes one could accept that competing mafia's might be benevolent. But why should they? someone with 51% of the compute can dictate if you can trade bitcoin. That is, if you were to transact something with your keycode, they could prevent it from entering the block chain, thus nullifying your transaction. They can hold the entire system hostage or blackmail individuals.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There are many ways to profit from tanking a currency.
Yes please a formal specification! I tried implementing Bitcoin but quickly realized the documentation is incomplete and sometimes even incorrect. People keep saying how the protocol is beautiful but honestly these people don't know what they are talking about. It's a big mess to look at that codebase.
Why do we have specification you might ask? Specifications are a type of contract and as a type of contract they are there to assign blame. It answers the question "Who is violating the specification" when something doesn't go as planned. Which leads me to my next point. It isn't fair to other implementations if the specification is the original Bitcoin client.