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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.

4 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is Bitcoin doing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As opposed to every other currency in the world, ever.

  2. The underlying problem appears grave by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So the underlying problem is there is phenomenological evidence that indicates that for long stretches of time, some cartel can controls 51% of the block chain compute and is withholding submits so it can privately mine them before distributing them.

    If I understand bitcoin correctly, both of those are its fundamental achilles heel, assumed never to happen, and therefore the currency is now subject to manipulation, and thus eventually worthless.

    Or am I wrong?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:The underlying problem appears grave by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  3. Re:How is Bitcoin doing? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?