

No, Bitcoin isn’t broken - d4vlx
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/07/no-bitcoin-isnt-broken/

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betterunix
This is a pretty shaky analysis:

 _Indeed, the biggest problems with their attack are social more than
technological_

Try making that argument with, say, an attack on PGP, or on TLS, or frankly
any other cryptosystem people are not so emotionally attached to.

 _the honest nodes can always pick the ticket announced by the honest miner
over the evil miner 's ticket_

Much like Internet users can _always_ remove the root certificates of
untrustworthy CAs. Again, apply this argument to other cryptosystems and see
how far it gets you.

 _the Cornell attack would be easy for honest miners to detect_

Maybe so, but then what? It is also easy to detect that a CA is giving out
certificates for MITM attacks, but that does not even come remotely close to
solving the problem. Suppose that the honest miners do what the author
suggests and publicize their lists of trusted miners -- then we would have a
block chain fork as people simple failed to ignore the supposedly dishonest
miners, or worse, if the dishonest miners also published such lists (how would
the average user distinguish this?). Why should I believe one mining pool's
account of who is honest or dishonest over another, anyway?

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mkramlich
I've been a fan of Bitcoin for a while but this latest brouhaha got me to
start thinking seriously about how to help out the ecosystem. Think what I've
started designing and building is promising, and doesn't really exist yet. But
is badly needed.

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AsymetricCom
Good approachable breakdown. I wonder if any of the "bigger problems" he
mentions are fundamental to the bitcoin protocol.

