Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Coinbase reallocation to discourage Finney attacks

From: Gareth Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 May 2014 00:31:08 +1000

On 30/04/14 23:55, Mike Hearn wrote:
>     If Bitcoin works correctly nobody should have to care if they consider
>     themselves attackers, defenders, or little green men from Mars.
> 
> 
> One last time, I request that people read the white paper from 2008
> before making statements like this. If the notion of attacker was
> irrelevant to Bitcoin, it would not be mentioned in the abstract, would it? 

I've read it :) The notion of an attacker is obviously relevant to
someone designing the system. It should not be relevant to someone
running a node.

I'll retire from posting on this too, I've posted way too much.

Our fundamental disagreement is simply that you think Bitcoin is, or
should be, a /democratic/ system. I think Bitcoin is, and should be, a
/trustless/ system. If we're going to resort to appeal to authority,
I'll point to the words "Electronic Cash System" in the title of
Satoshi's whitepaper :-P He intended to create ecash; that's widely
understood to mean trustless.

If there was this magic computer up in the sky somewhere, free from
human influence, that would run Satoshi's code for him in perpetuity
(let's overlook the initial upload please, bear with me), then I believe
Satoshi would've built his perfectly trustless ecash to run on that.

For lack of such a magic masterless computer he had to approximate one,
ingeniously using distributed consensus to achieve it. That's his real
invention - the "magic masterless computer" simulator, and the incentive
scheme to get the world to run it for him. (We'll see more of what it
can do if Ethereum ever gets off the ground.)

But for Pete's sake, Bitcoin is trustless. Just because the
infrastructure it sits atop is "democratic" (because there was no other
way to implement it,) doesn't mean you suddenly have to start voting on
everything.