[Cryptography] Fun and games with international transaction settlement (was Re: IBM looking at adopting bitcoin technology for major currencies)

[Ben Laurie]

On 14 March 2015 at 20:18, Robert Hettinga <hettinga at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bitcoin, which amounts to registered unforgeable certificates with a
> distributed, and also unforgeable, certificate registry.


It really doesn't. 51% (more properly, 34%) attacks show that it doesn't.

If it were done properly, i.e. with verifiable append only logs run by a
known set of entities, then it would. It would also be many orders of
magnitude cheaper. Stupidly cheap, in fact, instead of eye-wateringly
expensive.

I do wish people would stop perpetuating this canard.
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