[Cryptography] blockchain and trustworthy computing

phm moonpunter at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 01:05:32 EDT 2015


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Peter Todd wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:22:10PM -0400, ianG wrote: > In the Bitcoin world I think it's fair to say that most experts are
very concerned about the high, and increasing, % of users who use SPV
clients rather than run full nodes. While it's hard to predict exactly
when this threshold is reached, at some point too few people will be
actually verifying the blockchain to sufficiently strongly incentivise
miners to follow the rules. For instance, at some point miners can great
bitcoins out of thin air to increase their profits. >
While I share your concern and generally encourage people to have a full
copy of the block chain unless there is a very, very good reason not to
(Armory over Electrum, desktop over mobile, etc.),  I am incredibly
curious as to how coins could be "created out of thin air." Whether or
not folks have full nodes, they can still review the block chain through
a given explorer. It seems perhaps your real fear is that ignorance
among new users of the protocol will eventually lead to malfeasance at
the hands of those more practiced in it.

But still, how could these coins be generated without there being some
actual provenance on the blockchain? Wouldn't the miners in fact then be
stealing coins, in a sense? On the one hand, by generating oversized
coinbase rewards somehow (please explain), that's theft from the future.
On the other, sending coins that don't belong to them, in effect,
invalidates some other coins.

Obviously miner centralization could create such a scenario. I've read
on the bitcoin-dev list recently that there's talk via BIP 99 (I think)
of having a way of changing the protocol such that ASIC farms would have
to essentially reboot.

But, seriously. Please tell us how miners could "create coins out of
thin air." I've never heard of such an idea until now.

phm
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