
MIT ChainAnchor – Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin - jackgavigan
https://petertodd.org/2016/mit-chainanchor-bribing-miners-to-regulate-bitcoin
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RubyPinch
"ChainAnchor has been developed for permissioned / private blockchains, and
not for the bitcoin blockchain."

and the website that only has a small blurb... and the latest draft of their
paper on the topic? it seems somewhat absurd to forget to mention that, like
as if they were trying to hide the paper or something

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petertodd
FWIW, that draft was added after I published my blog post.

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riprowan
Bitcoin is like a case study in how profit-seeking creates centralized
systems:

Start with a system whose explicit goal is to create a decentralized, bottom-
up P2P cash. End up with a system governed hamfistedly by a handful of
developers and a few ASIC manufacturers and their obnoxious business partners.

Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian
bastion of the People's Republic of China.

SMH

~~~
VMG
> Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian
> bastion of the People's Republic of China.

Why is that a punch line? I don't see the contradiction.

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narrator
I love this joke of a proposal. Especially the diagram with the centralized
database node. It made me spit out my drink. Why not just run the whole
blockchain through a centralized database if you're going to do it that way?
Write a web-app with a database backend and some web services and call it a
day.

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Dowwie
I think people need to stop and think about the ChainAnchor project without
jumping to stark conclusions about its intent.

ChainAnchor is an experiment born in MIT. The project is lead by Sandy
Pentland and company, who have a strong record in pursuing rights online.
Pentland's group releases papers, as all academics do, to foster peer review.

In the case of blockchains and cryptocurrency, practioners like Peter Todd
(author of this blog post) _could_ play an important role in that peer review
process. However, in this circumstance Todd responded in a public,
inflammatory way.

Consider for a moment what an entirely academic-led peer review process would
be like if controversial papers such as that about ChainAnchor were publicly
attacked and its authors humiliated. This would quickly become an unsafe
environment to explore and challenge ideas.

If academia is to partner with practitioners / experts, both groups are going
to need to achieve a mutually beneficial arrangement to advance the field
together. This is now a case of what such an arrangement _would not_ look
like.

for the record-- I currently have no commercial nor academic interests in this
subject

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knocte
If you can bribe certain actors to corrupt a system, the system is not
decentralized enough.

I guess this is the consequence of mining centralization (but I have faith
that this problem will be solved).

~~~
riprowan
> I have faith that this problem will be solved

By what mechanism do foresee this happening (ie. users change PoW, much
greater diffusion of mining hardware, order-of-magnitude crash in price, etc?)

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knocte
Good question.

I have a project in mind :)

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traverseda
Regardless of this being chainanchor's goal, do you think this approach would
work?

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wmf
Bribing Chinese miners to prevent themselves from using Bitcoin to circumvent
capital controls? Sure, why not?

