[Cryptography] On the 'regulation proof' aspect of Bitcoin

[Ray Dillinger]

On 03/31/2016 07:19 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
 want to have a look at the the BitTorrent protocol, or even rsync.
> 
> Well the Merkle chain is remarkably resilient by itself.
> 
> Consider a situation in which we have ten independent notaries
> maintaining separate public chains. Every day they take the output
> from every other chain and enroll it as an input. Any attempt at
> rollback now requires every notary to collude and even then the
> defection will be obvious to anyone keeping notes.

Cost of introducing parties with a privileged role w/r/t the
block chain:  Technically speaking, limited. Probably no
worse for security than the existing threat of collusion
among miners to execute the "selfish miner" attack.

Cost of selecting the parties to occupy those positions?
Politically speaking, impossible. Especially considering
how dysfunctional the community around Bitcoin is.

> The notary isn't actually a trusted third party in the long term.
> After the data is enrolled in the mesh, it no longer has any more
> ability to assist an attacker in any fashion whatsoever.

Rolling back a multi-notarized block after it's published
would certainly alert everyone to the fact that the notaries
as a group are cooperating to effect the rollback.

It is unclear whether the governments of the world are too
dysfunctional to cooperate in forcing all notaries to
perform such collusion at the same time.  Precedent so
far says they probably are.  Further, it is hard to imagine
a situation in which they have sufficient mutual motivation
to force a rollback; if they cooperate in forcing all
notaries to do anything, it probably won't be for anything
less important than something that would convince them
they needed to shut it down completely.  And as John
pointed out, if they were going to cooperate in an effort
to shut it down, it would not be difficult for them to
do so with the current mining scheme.

In fact as matters stand either of two different governments -
The US and China - whose markets and exports give the stuff
most of its licit economic value - could shut it down
unilaterally.

> I had to look at rsync in detail as prior art for a client. Under the
> covers it is very similar to git in fact.

It would be more accurate to say git is very similar to
rsync.  ;-)

				Bear


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