[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[jrzx]

On Tuesday, January 26, 2021 11:24 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
> What you're checking with the authority about is the potential for inconsistent additional
> uses of the token. If you check with an authority and discover there was a particular chain
> height where the authority's chain and the token's chain show different spends for
> example, you can figure out who double spent it, revoke their cert, and sue them for
> counterfeiting. But you don't need the authority's help to see that the record of spends
> from minting to you is well-formed, and the double-spend->revoke feature, combined with
> certs NOT being freely available, should keep instances of double spending very rare.

"Certs not being freely available" is the number of the beast problem that crypto currency attempts to address.

A cryptocurrency where you need permission from authority to own and spend the currency would have all the defects of the US$, and none of the advantages.

Observe no end of people being deplatformed and demonetized, often for no intelligible reason. From time to time paypal freezes someone's account and tells them they are banned from paypal forever, meaning paypal confiscated the cash in the account (and there was always cash in the account when this happens) And their bank account linked to the account is frozen also. They go to the bank, and after much travail, get their bank account back, but not their paypal funds. And no one at the bank knows, or if they know, will reveal, the reason for the confiscation and the freeze.
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