[Cryptography] Does Bitcoin have unaddressed design flaws?

[jrzx]

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, February 7, 2021 9:10 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
> (A) A system that can handle six thousand transactions a
> second cannot be meaningfully a blockchain system.

The blockdag is clearly a blockchain system, is so described
in the many papers that address scaling, and my design,
like the numerous excellent designs I swiped it from, should
be able to handle about six thousand transactions per second
on a group of peers with good internet connections and about
eight twelve terabyte hard disks in a raid 6 configuration.

The essence of a blockchain was I think proposed, or at least extensively discussed on this list long ago, as an immutable append only data structure that determines the current state of a database - the intended purpose being that people could not retroactively adjust the association between cryptographic and human readable identifiers.

If it is an immutable append only data structure with a hash that can used to prove facts about its current state, and summarizes a sequence of hashes that summarize all its past states, it is a blockchain.

He who controls the past controls the future.  He who controls the present controls the past.  The blockchain has very broad application throughout our society to resist what is being done to us.  Bitcoin was only the beginning.  We need next (after fixing scaling, and the lightning network) to fix accounting and bookkeeping, which is falling apart under Sarbanes Oxley (MF Global and the Great Mortgage Meltdown, the disappearance of IPOs)


> (B) attempts to "overthrow the existing financial system"
> are laughable,

I can see it falling before our eyes.  The only thing holding it up is the transaction limit on bitcoin.

The existing financial system relies excessively on trust, and
our elite is increasingly untrustworthy and unable and unwilling to trust each other.

You just cannot operate a trust based system with the people we have.