[Cryptography] Code is Cruel -- The DAO

[Alfie John]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 12:54:13PM -0400, Peter Todd wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 04:16:14PM -0400, ianG wrote:
> > In more accounting terms, the typical defence against this is to implement
> > double entry bookkeeping, so that the value cannot be "created" out of thin
> > air, it must come from somewhere
> 
> I don't see why you would have a double-entry backend in a computer system;
> just re-do the calculations and see if you get the same result. After all,
> that's how cryptocurrencies work: everyone who fully validates re-checks every
> calculation, and scalability approaches focus on limiting the scope of who
> needs to fully validate (e.g. Lightning's approach of caching transactions, so
> most transactions are between a small number of parties, or my own client-side
> validation approach of only calculating history relevant to you).
> 
> What's more important is having a 100% accurate recording of what the
> transactions are supposed to be in the first place, but that's what consensus
> algorithms do, whatever the exact approach is that you take.

This will be less important in the far future if Bitcoin were to ever
adopt some form of hidden transaction e.g Monero and Zcash. Once you
don't even know the details of transactions, the only thing that's
relevant is that blocks pass validation.

Alfie

-- 
Alfie John
https://www.alfie.wtf