Topic: Flaw or just a bad debater :( (Read 1244 times)

I tried to bring up the distributed network, but she failed to see how not everybody in this network would not try to break it.

thanks for the pointers. My couch is a very nice place though
In my language(Dutch) a couch is called a 'bank'.. maybe I should try to find a way to sit on the blockchain instead


(if it is not the proper topic, you can report it to be moved, but I thought it was a question of security and therefore technical)

I thought this post was an interesting thing.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-is-a-bitcoin-in-my-computer-an-archive-an-abstract-value-974172

And how the keys work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk

Basically, you could just argue that a distributed network of people together power Bitcoin.

Or use some facts that may not have been completely confirmed. Only because ASICs can't compare with normal CPU/GPU operations.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-faster-than-top-500-supercomputers-combined/


Also arguing with your wife/significant other never makes sense, because the couch isn't a nice place...

Yes. And what is the cost per one transaction in banks systems and in bitcoin?
I think that we should compare relative costs, not absolute values.
(Note: I ask about cost per transaction, not about the transaction fees)

Sorry, seems to me that this post is offtopic for "Development & Technical Discussion"

Banks spend a lot of money on their IT. The budget of a major bank is in excess of 1 billion USD / year. The complexity of the system is mind boggling. It's app talking to app, talking to db, etc. Massive spaghetti with meat balls. Many of these are legacy and/or vendor.
At the end of the day, it's amazing that it works. But you have a lot of redundancy and checks. Most of the code is crappy, so it is verified by a few other piece of code. At the end, it gives a good resistance to hacking through obfuscation.
However, sometimes a bug goes through and is catastrophic. For instance: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/928a1528-1859-11e2-80e9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3VDsmClZS (It was a flag that was reused).

wrong.

also wrong.

Your wife is right to not just accept a more secure claim easily.

I guess the greatest point to make is that the banking system is also heavily dependent on software and involves a lot of use of completely opaque software-- even opaque to the bank itself-- where subtle backdoors could be introduced and fraud could, in theory, be conducted which is indistinguishable from your normal activity, meaning that the banks normal 'fix it after the fact' might not work.   So I don't think it would be correct to say that traditional banking is necessarily in a superior position with respect to the particular attack vector of subtle software backdoors.

Bitcoin is completely open and transparent software updates to it are reviewed by a great many people. We have some evidence that critical intentional errors would be caught on the basis of the less serious accidental errors which have been caught.  Going further, even if a bad version is released, nothing pushes that onto users systems but the users themselves. New versions take a fairly long time to become widely deployed which allows time for additional review and analysis.

You're also right to point out that if there were some catastrophic failure which everyone agreed was a failure the community of Bitcoin users wouldn't just say "oh well, we have to live with it".  Actions external to the system could correct most things, though it's hard to reason about that because it's assuming the system failed and it'll be upto messy human politics to resolve things.

Ultimately I think the best description here would be to say that Bitcoin is differently strong from banks. It has different weaknesses-- it's believed to be more sensitive to software engineering and to end-user security, and it's believed to be less sensitive to political abuse, uncertain economic policy, and various kinds of uncasual fairness.  In practice Bitcoin could be either more or less secure than traditional banks, depending on your own practices and exposures (e.g. if you make large cash transactions you are more exposed to random seizures with banks, if you get malware on your computer you are more exposed to Bitcoin theft); and unpredictable activity going on in the wider world (compare vulnerabilities in Bitcoin software to the cyprus banking haircut).

From the perspective of straight computer security banks generally have awful security, but because they have almost limitless power to seize funds and reverse transactions in practice their security is usually okay. But not always--, the same unlimited seizure and reversal power contributes to many of the awful stories of completely unjustified civil forfeiture (and other kinds of adverse action without due process), or just the huge cost and collateral harm when the bank does make an error give reason to think carefully about how you manage your funds. The traditional banking system also leaves you exposed to monetary policy, where inflation continually devalues your money to the benefit of powerful third parties... Today, Bitcoin has substantial volatility risks and risks related to it being new and niche, but these and other reasons are points that may make it ultimately a productive and widely used tool for society.

This weekend I tried to convince my wife that the blockchain is more secure than the banking systems, but she thought it would be very easy(for a skilled team of hackers and programmers) to infect the basecode of the chain and mining software with a backdoor and at that way manipulate the chain and transactions even make new coins.

It was hard to convince her the shear size of that kind of opperation and improbability of it is so big, that putting even 1/10 of the effort in the fiat banking systems would be way more profitable and likely to succeed. That the backdoor would be easily spotted and rejected by the community and the chain if corrupted would be restored by the vast network of still clean and trusted servers.

It made me think, do I think too pro bitcoin to see a flaw here? Or am I just bad at giving good arguements that counter my wifes?