[Cryptography] Bitcoins and lobbyists

[Karl]

On Feb 27, 2018 5:54 PM, "Henry Baker" <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

At 12:57 PM 2/27/2018, Bertrand Mollinier Toublet wrote:
>> On Feb 27, 2018, at 05:19, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
>>
>> (I'm going to use the term "Bitcoin" here as the best-known examplar of
many block-chain-based cryptocurrencies.)<br>
>>
>> It occurred to me that she was performing -- by hand -- many of the same
steps that a Bitcoin miner has to perform, by tracing the sources and sinks
of the various money flows through individuals, corporations, LLC's, law
firms, etc.<br>
>
>I'm not sure I understand the implied relationship between mining and
tracing money flows?  Henry, can you clarify what you mean?
<p>

Bitcoin mining accomplishes two useful tasks:<p>

1) continual consistency checking of the entire blockchain and<p>

2) mining lottery winners extend the blockchain & collect modest fee<p>

Task #1 -- together with Bitcoin address identification -- makes
transaction tracing trivial.<p>


All bitcoin clients continuously check the entire blockchain consistency.
Miners throw tons of work into the hashchain so that it is incredibly hard
to fake the contents.  None of this checking involves tracing; that is done
by third parties using tools that explore the chain everyone has verified.

Of course, obviously those interested in real democracy would prefer an
economic solution that shakes up existing power structures.
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