[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

Peter Todd pete at petertodd.org
Thu Aug 18 13:44:34 EDT 2016


On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 01:29:11AM -0400, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> There are plenty of useless (both to theory and to practice) theoretical results; in fact, the vast majority of published theory papers probably include just such results!  And there are plenty of useful but not very deep practical results.  But trying to argue that Bitcoin "solved this problem the theory people couldn't solve" is just silly.
>                                                         -- Jerry

Note that Bitcoin - specifically proof-of-work - does solve a problem that
signature-based approaches can't: even if the people building consensus in
Bitcoin (miners) all conspire to change history, it's provably expensive for
them to rewrite history because they have to re-do all the proof-of-work.
That's not true in signature based consensus, as forging a signature is free.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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