Topic: concerns on the bitcoin system: isn't it TOO perfect? - page 2. (Read 2927 times)

Bitcoin, being as near perfect a money as man has yet created, will succeed only when we recognize just how useless and backwards money really is and abandon the concept entirely.

Perfect? Nah it has its problems

Human error caused a fork several months ago via an incompatible wallet upgrade.

No Government on earth will adopt Bitcoin so as long Satoshi has control of his pre-mined. Thanx for the prototype.

well that reply burns out my conspiracy theory concerns, thanks.

Regarding public transactions, I see what you mean, and it's invaluable hearing an opinion from someone who obviously knows all the specific ins and outs. Do you think ZeroCoin could help in this regard?

Not so, there were quite a few serious flaws in it. We've fixed them over time and repaired the damage. OP_RETURN in a scriptSig originally let you spend anyone's coin— "No need to check the rules, let me by!"—  value overflow let anyone summon a billion bitcoins out of thin air, the hash tree second preimage let anyone pick a block and doom it on the network, lshift (and related bugs): corrupt the memory of and crash all the nodes, duplicate transaction IDs with inconsistent rewrites left the chain vulnerable to irreconcilable forks between old and newly bootstrapped nodes. I'm sure I'm missing quite a few other deep protocol issues, plus a litany of more conventional bugs, memory leaks, and (serious) performance shortcomings.

As impressive as Bitcoin was on its first day it was far from perfect— atypically reliable for such new and novel software, perhaps, but it had to be.  Regardless of  the original being the work of just one person or more than one it has taken many people to get it to what it is today.

No, it's not a good thing and I expect that Satoshi would have agreed that its not good. But it's the thing we can do. Bitcoin was already pushing the envelope of the kind of system that can be engineered (esp. when you start talking about making compatible alt. implementations) and at the time there was really no prospect of building a system that accomplished the goals without the public verification. It's not even completely clear yet if Bitcoin itself is fully viable, if transactions were a bit more expensive to store or validate, if the software was a bit more complex to author and maintain— perhaps Bitcoin would be a big mess of failure, perhaps it still will.

Only very recently has the very cutting edge of computer science and cryptography— e.g.  things like Groth's 2010 paper and Gennaro, Gentry, Parno, and Raykova's 2012 improved system— suggested that we could build succinct zero-knowledge argument systems with performance and space requirements not so far off from what Bitcoin uses today that we could even _consider_ the possibility of privacy stronger than Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity in a zero-trust fully decentralized system.  And this is real rocket science stuff, layer after layer of idea that was only conceived of in the last decade or two, while Bitcoin can be pretty completely grasped— and trusted— by someone with a conventional, industry level, understanding of information technology... and could have been implemented with 1970s computer science (though not with acceptable performance on 1970s hardware— we're hardly keeping up as is).

This simply isn't true, it was very far away from perfect and it still isn't perfect.
From what I've read Satoshi's code was more of an "rough diamond", while the idea was brilliant the code was not and had to be changed a lot.
There are still a lot of issues that have to be solved in the future (like the block size limit).

I think this is a valid concern, if someone has too much control over the system, it would be easy to watch every step.

I think many of us are amazed at how genius, from a computer science point of view, the bitcoin system is. Fom the high-level design solutions, like using a computational/mathematical property (difficult reversebility of hash functions) to produce proof of work and secure the blockchain, down to the low-level implementation details (personally I don't know about that, but I'm confident that at least bitcoin-qt's code is well audited and doesn't contain any major bug).

So, if you're skeptical like me, this, plus the fact that it's creator has put so much effort in remaining anonymous (and even there, he hasn't made ONE error), automatically raises a question: isn't it too perfect? I mean, it's so well enginereed, and all by the same unknown person (or group of persons) - from the concept down to the software, and no one in all these years, despite the huge incentive, has found any flaw in it (all coins lost have come from human error, never from a bug in the protocol or in bitcoin-qt). Such astonishingly well-enginereed software, at least for me, brings Stuxnet up to mind, and IIRC we know that it was very likely made by some secret government agency, and probably LOTS of funds and research went into it (and that is a good explanation for a software that has no bugs).

So, while I'm long on bitcoin and I see the great benefits it could bring, it has my skeptical-senses tingling. Am I the only one?

A more detailed fact contributes to my skepticism: are we so sure that having *every* transaction recorded and public is really a good thing? If in the future bitcoin will completely take over other payment systems (like everyone here hopes, and it very well could given its immense advantages), including cash, we will live in NSA's heaven: you recieve your wage on a certain address, which very likely will be tied by law to your identity, and you can't do anything anonymously with that money. You can't not pay taxes, buy drugs or anything the government decides it's illegal, have privacy on how much money you hold. Probably the only way to have "unwatched" bitcoins would be to buy them with gold or silver (which you would have to have purchased earlier than this supposed big-brother regime) on the black market, but you would then have two separate stream of coins, which could never interact if you wanted to preserve anonymity. So bitcoin would actually be the exact opposite of anonymity.

I think we all agree this scenario looks very bad - do you think we could ever get there? Or is there some logical flaw in my reasoning?

I'm very interested in hearing opinions and a serious discussion on this. I hope this doesn't come out as trolling, I'm truly just skeptical, in a genuine and scientific way (i.e. I'd be very happy of being proven wrong)