[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

[Peter Todd]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 09:13:25PM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
> On 19 August 2016 at 01:49, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:
> >
> > Bitcoin works just fine if the majority of miners are dishonest, so long as
> > they are economically rational within the context of the Bitcoin protocol (e.g.
> > they're not getting out-of-band payments from state actors larger than the
> > mining reward). If Bitcoin required miners to behave "honestly" it'd be a much
> > less secure system.
> 
> There's no reason to believe miners are economically rational within
> the context of the Bitcoin protocol. Recent counterexample is Chandler
> Guo declaring he would attack Ethereum Classic...

FYI Chandler Guo never did attack Ethereum Classic in the end, and later
changed his mind and is now supporting Ethereum Classic:

http://coinjournal.net/miner-attack-ethereum-classic-now-supporting/

Also, note how I said "within the context of the Bitcoin protocol" - competing
forks is something where more research needs to be done to better understand
what exactly the incentives are; once you start taking competing forks into
account we're probably talking about a situation where "economically rational
within the context" isn't a statement that easily applies. Yet that's still a
stronger system than one that has to assume miners are 'honest'

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