[Cryptography] Is it mathematically provably impossible to construct a mechanism to test for back doors in programs?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 11:22 AM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> Talking about proof of work and so forth, seen on the net:
>
>
> ==================
> In Bitcoin, such a fork is useless, since you’re just increasing the
> amount of time you would need to catch up. In blockchain-based proof of
> work, however, it is a serious problem. The reason is that if you start
> a fork straight from the genesis block, then while your mining will be
> slow at first, after a few hundred blocks you will be able to fill the
> blockchain up with contracts that are very easy for you to mine, but
> difficult for everyone else. One example of such a contract is simply:

Why do we have to make such a fetish of the block chain being computed
by 'wading through treacle'?

BitCoin has achieve notoriety and fame but little else. it is a
complete failure as a currency, the float is purportedly worth $5
billion but nobody would claim that anywhere near $5 billion of
bitcoin commerce has occurred. Most of the transactions are endless
churning to create the illusion of activity.

We can achieve a robust notary infrastructure that is proof against
defection for considerably less money. Let there be 32 independent
notary log maintainers who maintain a Harber-Stornetta style hash
chain log (i.e. what is used in Certificate Transparency). Each notary
has very limited defection opportunities and any defection would be
quickly noticed.

Now let each notary include the outputs from the other notaries once
an hour. Now it requires every notary to defect for a defection to
succeed without being noticed.



Unlike the BitCoin system, this one does not waste more electricity
than is used by some nation states (currently they are consuming more
electricity than Cyprus). Further the possibility of the log being
rewritten is considerably less, the system is always predictable.