From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay•com>
To: Alessandro Parisi <startithub@gmail•com>
Cc: Ittay <ittay.eyal@cornell•edu>,
"Bitcoin Dev" <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>,
"Emin Gün Sirer" <egs@systems•cs.cornell.edu>,
"Gavin Andresen" <gavin@bitcoinfoundation•org>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 13:37:04 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJHLa0MO9Q7D_9xmXPYKrebC7sMLoZtJ4epFSk36e8mMNMSKGg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CADre0dm0PGARSXXdwoa1ZOnpbEw_bx0aKP17q4PSFLTayyoRJw@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Alessandro Parisi <startithub@gmail•com> wrote:
> I agree with Ittay: when bugs are found, they must be fixed ASAP, expecially
> when they affect a sensitive sw such as Bitcon; in IT security, every flaw
> that is exploitable in abstract, is going to be exploited in real, sooner or
> later, also taking into account the increasing parallel computing power;
> beware of false sense of security
That is quite ignorant. Bitcoin is far more complex than standard IT
security "fix ASAP" mantra. Distributed consensus is a new field of
computer science, and blindly applying standard logic to bitcoin will
quickly result in large problems.
Every fix has the chance of changing the game theory or economics of
bitcoin. A change to the core consensus protocol within bitcoin --
mining -- is even more game-theory- and economically-critical to the
core system. Changes thus have more impact, where any change
potentially reduces bitcoin's value to zero in the worst case.
Bitcoin is akin to medical device or avionics software. We cannot
just change at will, without significant research, analysis and
testing. "It is a bug, it must be fixed ASAP" is ignorant and
dangerous.
Further, this is at present a THEORETICAL problem, and the solution
presented has some obvious flaws, that would make our current, WORKING
SYSTEM more fragile, and less secure.
--
Jeff Garzik
Senior Software Engineer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-11-05 18:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-11-05 16:56 Ittay
2013-11-05 17:05 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:14 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:43 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:54 ` Mike Hearn
2013-11-05 18:07 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:37 ` Jeff Garzik [this message]
2013-11-05 18:55 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:58 ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 19:33 ` Jameson Lopp
2013-11-05 19:56 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:26 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:37 ` Patrick
2013-11-05 18:18 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:57 ` Jeremy Spilman
2013-11-05 22:49 ` Ittay
2013-11-07 20:05 ` [Bitcoin-development] comments on selfish-mining model (Re: BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.) Adam Back
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