Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 13:37:04 -0500

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Alessandro Parisi <[email-masked]> 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/