[Cryptography] DNSNMC deprecates Certificate Authorities and fixes HTTPS security

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Tue Dec 17 20:15:38 EST 2013


On Dec 16, 2013, at 4:33 PM, Greg wrote:
...completely missing the point of Ben's paper.  It really comes down to the following:

"So now we have either an existence proof of an efficient solution, or a proof that Bitcoin doesn’t work."

All the criticisms of the "efficient solution" are irrelevant, as the point of the paper was that *no one knows of an efficient solution (to the group consensus problem) and few believe there is one*.  The paper is offered as a proof by contrapositive that "Bitcoin doesn't work" - though you have to read that phrase in context.  What's being denied is that "Bitcoin is a decentralized currency" in the sense described in the paper.

Note the title of the paper!  Or just read the last paragraph of the abstract:

"Both Bitcoin and my alternative proposal suffer from a problem for which there is no known solution: creating consensus in a group with open, changing membership. But at least my proposal fails in an energy efficient way, unlike Bitcoin."
                                                        -- Jerry



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