BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen Will Start His Own Cryptocurrency (torrentfreak.com)

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, has showed deep interest in cryptocurrency in the past, and now it looks like he is going to start his own. From a report: Without going into technical details, Cohen believes that Bitcoin is wasteful. He suggests that a cryptocurrency that pins the mining value on storage space rather than processor time will be superior. In an interview with TorrentFreak's Steal This Show, Cohen revealed that his interest in cryptocurrencies is not merely abstract. It will be his core focus in the near future. "My proposal isn't really to do something to BitCoin. It really has to be a new currency," Cohen says. "I'm going to make a cryptocurrency company. That's my plan." By focusing on a storage based solution, BitTorrent's inventor also hopes to address other Bitcoin flaws, such as the 51% attack. "Sometimes people have this misapprehension that Bitcoin is a democracy. No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it's called a 51% attack for a reason. That's not a majority of the vote, that's not how Bitcoin works."

Comments

Obligatory XKCD

[dysmal]

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit you're a moron.

Cue Oprah

[OzPeter]

You get a cryptocurrency! And You get a cryptocurrency!

Everyone gets a cryptocurrency!

Retard

[sexconker]

"Sometimes people have this misapprehension that Bitcoin is a democracy. No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it's called a 51% attack for a reason. That's not a majority of the vote, that's not how Bitcoin works."

That's exactly how Bitcoin works.
If you control more than 50% of the nodes storing the blockchain, you can manipulate the currency to your heart's content.
If you do it in such a way that someone notices, people will fork the blockchain. Forking the blockchain has already happened due to other issues. And it went about as smoothly as anyone could have hoped for.

PROTIP: If this new cryptocurrency involves any sort of premine or exclusivity period, it's a scam.

Re:Retard

[Orgasmatron]

If you control more than 50% of the nodes storing the blockchain, you can manipulate the currency to your heart's content.

Except that you can't. If you have more hashing power than the rest of the world combined, you can: change the order of transactions. That's all that you can do.

Re:Retard

[GLMDesigns]

wish I had mod points.

This is correct. If you have 51% of the hashing power for a period of time you can double spend (ie spend your bitcoin; take it back and spend it again - the BTC version of counterfitting). Of course if you do that you devaluate the value of BTC

However, BTC is getting too centralized. One of the basic premises behind BTC was that anyone and everyone can mine to one degree or another with their CPU. With the advent of ASICS that's no longer the case.

Only with CPU only hashing (ok, if you insist, GPU only hashing) will Bitcoin come close the ideal that everyone is a node and everyone has a roughly comparable stake.

Even if I have 100,000 CPUs and you only have one we'll be more "equal" than now where you have one CPU versus people with ASIC farms.

Re:Retard

[sexconker]

Owning the network and owning the hash power are separate things.

If you own the network, then you can lie to other nodes about stuff. Other nodes would be like "WTF?" and the network would split. But that's not automatic, and until people can trace back and find out which nodes are janky, you can profit in the chaos.

This sort of attack needs storage and network resources, not computational resources. For a successful attack giving you a usable time window in which to take action, you would want the network to be as distributed as possible.

With hashing power you can "change the order of transactions", sure, but as others have pointed out that means you can spend BTC you don't have, fuck other transactions, etc. This is the attack everyone worries about because the Chinese ASIC farms basically control Bitcoin at this point. But they're not controlled by a single entity and any shenanigans would again be met with a fork.

Re:Retard

[sexconker]

"No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it's called a 51% attack for a reason. That's not a majority of the vote, that's not how Bitcoin works."

51% would be a majority of the vote. That's how Bitcoin works. It's still a democracy. Democracies can use majority voting vs plurality voting, include runoffs until a majority is reached, or some manner of supermajority.

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, democracy has more to do with who can vote than where you set the finish line?

Missing the point

[Orgasmatron]

Sorry Bram, but you are missing the point. Hashing is used in bitcoin precisely because it is useless. It can't be faked, and it can't be stored for later. It is an irrevocable commitment right now.

I wish you luck with monetizing distributed storage, or decentralized distribution, or whatever your new project ends up as. But the design of bitcoin is not a programming challenge for you to solve. It is a carefully interlocked design, made by someone (or some people) who has (or have) a far beyond average understanding of money and cryptography. Many people with less insight have attempted to "improve" things, and all have failed.

Re:Missing the point

[slew]

Sorry Bram, but you are missing the point. Hashing is used in bitcoin precisely because it is useless. It can't be faked, and it can't be stored for later. It is an irrevocable commitment right now.

I wish you luck with monetizing distributed storage, or decentralized distribution, or whatever your new project ends up as. But the design of bitcoin is not a programming challenge for you to solve. It is a carefully interlocked design, made by someone (or some people) who has (or have) a far beyond average understanding of money and cryptography. Many people with less insight have attempted to "improve" things, and all have failed.

Well, I'm not defending Bram on his quest, but I would say that based on this presentation at least he seems to know enough to know that he doesn't know how to do it yet (which is one step above those that don't even know what they don't know yet)...

It all may be a failure in the end, but at least there is a germ of an idea in there (which is more than I can say for most snake oil).

Re:Missing the point

[ctilsie242]

This. There is a reason why we are still using PGP, SSH, and SSL. It is because creating a new cryptographic protocol takes the best minds out there... and even then, there will be attacks that people didn't even think about like side channel stuff, quantum crypto, and other items, so the protocol always needs updating, if not a complete overhaul. Even then, old standbys like the OpenPGP format are showing their age, due to not supporting forward secrecy and using less efficient binary to ascii algorithms.

A cryptocurrency done willy-nilly will not last long. At best it will be pumped and dumped. However, if one can be designed from the ground up, without obvious crap like premining, it might be useful... BUT it takes a lot of effort, and it has to at least be better than BitCoin, especially in the anonymity department.

Re:Missing the point

[religionofpeas]

Problem with useful work is that it's hard to adjust the difficulty to arbitrary values. Someone could come up with a really clever way to do protein folding that cuts the CPU time by a factor of 100, and all of a sudden disrupt the currency.

What?

[OverlordQ]

it's called a 51% attack for a reason. That's not a majority of the vote,

Yeah it is, that's the exact definition of majority.

Re:What?

[peragrin]

Having 51% of the hushing power means that your version of bitcoin transaction are dominate over others. Therefore you can pollute the transactions with fake transactions to your hearts content and no one can stop you. Indeed more you do it the more it will continue.

Personally I am surprised bitcoin hasn't been bot netted into hashing yet

Re:What?

[DanielRavenNest]

No, but it is 51% of the transaction validation hardware, from which you earn block rewards and transaction fees. The rewards and fees are denominated in bitcoins, so it is in your self-interest to keep the value of a bitcoin high. Fucking around with the transaction history would destroy people's confidence in bitcoin, and they would flee for something else. Demand would drop, and so would the market price. Your expensive farm full of ASIC chips, which can do nothing but bitcoin hashing, is now earning tokens of no value.

One question

[GeekWithAKnife]

Why do we need a new currency?

What is the compelling business case that BTC, ETH, LTC, NMC or PPC cannot address perhaps with an update?

I get that everyone wants to invent a new cryptocurrency and own ten millions coins when they are worth $0.0001 until they make them a multimillionair...but really, what's in it for the rest of us?

I'll start my own cryptocurrency

[mcmonkey]

With hookers and black jack.

Actually, forget the cryptocurrency.

The worst bitcoin flaw, according to Bram Cohen

[GuB-42]

... it doesn't make Bram Cohen rich enough.

Number range

[DrYak]

Except that in the case of crypto-currencies, you can add a few trailing zeroes after the significant number.

NOT Anonymous

[DrYak]

Why do people do bitcoin? 1) To operate anonymously outside the system.

For the last time BITCOIN IS NOT ANONYMOUS. BY DESIGN.

The whole point of bitcoin is that it is *distributed*.
Means every single (full) node on the network has a complete copy of the transaction ledger and can independently verify that a balance is legit.
By definition, on bitcoin network *everyone* gets to see *every transaction*.

Bitcoin is at best pseudonymous :
Transactions aren't linked to your Real Identity (a la Facebook), but to a public key.
That public key require a bit of big data mining in order to map to an actual user, due to constant key change. But not beyond the processing capabilities of a state-level entity (it only stops your neighbour to spy on you).

But none the less transaction is anonymous.

The *real* reason why bitcoin is getting popular is because it is *distributed*. There is no single entity (in theory, short of a 51% attack) that controls the network, there is no "Bitcoin, Inc." on which you can put legal pressure to force blocking transactions.
(As opposed to, say, PayPal and Visa/Mastercard refusing to process donation to WikiLeaks).
So government can see you donating to wikileak, but can't do absolutely nothing to prevent it.

The only real anonymous payment method is actual cash.
(nobody has the power to track all the bill numbers)