I too am in IT and work with cryptography quite a bit. I feel like this article was fine. Can you elaborate as to what you found so terrible? The real problem in the example is key ownership is not as trust worthy as the blockchain they’re associated with (ignoring 51%).
The real problem with crypto (small cryptos and bitcoin) is a risk of a 51% attack as you pointed out. The top four bitcoin miners are all in China and make up 70-80% of all mining. If CCP seized that they can abuse it quite a bit with a 51% attack, potentially killing it altogether or targeted attacks.
Anyone running a full node (not a miner) is involved in consensus afaik - so it’s not quite just up to the miners, but it’s definitely a risk. It also happens to be the most overlooked issues by people who preach “BITCOIN FOR XYZ”.
Well, maybe you don’t understand blockchain, so lets draw some parallels to popular tech. Look at any distributed filesystem (hdfs), database (ETCD), kv store et al (basically anything that implements RAFT or similar). These systems all require quorum, some form of replication for their data, and create consensus. Now imagine a similar system that also codifies the transactions to this system as well AND it signs and validates all actions cryptographically and stores these transactions in the database as well. That’s a typical blockchain ledger, and it seems like a great way to track ownership of “things”.
BUT it doesn’t solve account security.
The article’s final point misses the mark. Humans will need to enforce the values from the tech onto the physical world if they wanted to go that way.
Edit: Included detaisl about storing the cryptographically signed transactions in teh database itself.
No I’m quite familiar with the blockchain. The article just seems to me to state the obvious, something that Bitcoin was never purported to solve, and then say that makes it useless.
I thought it was a great read, what don't you like about the article?
I too am in IT and work with cryptography quite a bit. I feel like this article was fine. Can you elaborate as to what you found so terrible? The real problem in the example is key ownership is not as trust worthy as the blockchain they’re associated with (ignoring 51%).
The real problem with crypto (small cryptos and bitcoin) is a risk of a 51% attack as you pointed out. The top four bitcoin miners are all in China and make up 70-80% of all mining. If CCP seized that they can abuse it quite a bit with a 51% attack, potentially killing it altogether or targeted attacks.
Anyone running a full node (not a miner) is involved in consensus afaik - so it’s not quite just up to the miners, but it’s definitely a risk. It also happens to be the most overlooked issues by people who preach “BITCOIN FOR XYZ”.
I’m a programmer and I thought it was meaningless. What was your takeaway from the article?
Well, maybe you don’t understand blockchain, so lets draw some parallels to popular tech. Look at any distributed filesystem (hdfs), database (ETCD), kv store et al (basically anything that implements RAFT or similar). These systems all require quorum, some form of replication for their data, and create consensus. Now imagine a similar system that also codifies the transactions to this system as well AND it signs and validates all actions cryptographically and stores these transactions in the database as well. That’s a typical blockchain ledger, and it seems like a great way to track ownership of “things”.
BUT it doesn’t solve account security.
The article’s final point misses the mark. Humans will need to enforce the values from the tech onto the physical world if they wanted to go that way.
Edit: Included detaisl about storing the cryptographically signed transactions in teh database itself.
No I’m quite familiar with the blockchain. The article just seems to me to state the obvious, something that Bitcoin was never purported to solve, and then say that makes it useless.