[ExI] Kevin Dowd on Bitcoin

[Harvey Newstrom]

> Andrew Poelstra wrote on Saturday, January 17, 2015 12:32 PM:
> There is no voting in Bitcoin. It is a consensus system: either you agree
with
> the consensus Bitcoin history, or you are not doing Bitcoin.

I don't know why you say there is no "voting" in Bitcoin, but then point out
the "consensus" system.  It's the same thing!  You are confirming what I
said, but you don't know it.

The "consensus" system randomly chooses stakeholders and has them "vote" to
achieve this "consensus".  Whatever they vote becomes the official
historical record.  It was originally assumed that they would vote
truthfully as to their observed histories.  But there is no technical reason
they couldn't all decide to vote for an unhistoric version and make it the
official record instead.  If a mining consortium gains a 51% majority (which
has already happened), they could theoretically start voting in favor of
their members instead of voting for historical accuracy.  Their desired
choices becomes the historical record instead of the accurate one in the
majority of cases due to the random selection of voters.

> Bitcoin's consensus system is covered in some detail in Section 6 of
>   https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf

I am familiar with how this works.

See page 15, the concluding paragraph under "Distributed consensus":
> The idea is that rather than depending on the economic inviability
>of taking control of a history, stakeholders are incentivized to agree
> on each extension because
> (a) they are randomly chosen and therefore unlikely to be in
collusion[...]
> (b) even if they can collude, they do not want to undermine the
system[...]
> (c) they have limited capacity to cause havoc anyway[...]

Really?  That's the technical argument?  People could undermine the system,
but they won't bother?  Trust me.  There are people who want to undermine
the system.  And they will bother.  It doesn't have to make sense to you why
they would do this.  They will do this.

The above flaws are easily fixed: by anti-monopoly rules, timing delays
between transactions, and tweaks to the random selection for consensus to
avoid choosing related members.  These are well-known problems and people
are already working on fixing them.  Some of these tweaks are already in
bitcoin and derivative currencies, and more tweaks are coming.  I don't know
why anybody would argue that a system is currently uncrackable and will
never need to be tweaked.  That's never turns out to be true.

--
Harvey Newstrom   www.HarveyNewstrom.com