Tone Vays is apparently not an expert. Apparently he has somewhat average or slightly above understanding of blockchain tech.
Afaics, Satoshi was incorrect:The payment processor has connections with many nodes. When it gets a transaction, it blasts it out, and at the same time monitors the network for double-spends. If it receives a double-spend on any of its many listening nodes, then it alerts that the transaction is bad. A double-spent transaction wouldn't get very far without one of the listeners hearing it. The double-spender would have to wait until the listening phase is over, but by then, the payment processor's broadcast has reached most nodes, or is so far ahead in propagating that the double-spender has no hope of grabbing a significant percentage of the remaining nodes.
This is a good start, but still not impermeable.
I didn't say impermeable, I said good-enough. The loss in practice would be far lower than with credit cards.
A
selfish miner with 33% of the network hash rate would simply withhold the double-spend transaction and release it when it wins the next block, thus reverting innumerable instant transactions.
Thus the loss rate could hypothetically be egregiously worse than the 5% chargeback rate on credit cards.
What Satoshi didn't account for is a systemic attack where the attacker has a game theory to bring down the Bitcoin price, e.g. is shorting it.
I am not saying that case is likely near-term, but when you are talking about the politics of who controls the world's transaction system, the Satoshi's design loses the key quality of it being impervious to control. Thus it is a power vacuum, which is precisely
what we are trying to eliminate with blockchains.
Satoshi apparently didn't account well for the systemic risks that come from the natural centralization of mining due to economics of ASIC farms. He seemed to think these parties would be ruled by the Nash equilibrium that says if they attack the network, then they destroy the value of their own investment, but he forgot about shorting and also that ASIC hardware can be fungible and used to mine other coins.
Also bytemaster (Daniel Larimer) was correct about the bandwidth and computational resources being a problem, but he didn't emphasize that the problem was scaling without centralization of the full nodes. But that centralization is coming to Satoshi's design any way due to the (even political, e.g. subsidies in China) economics of ASIC mining farms.
I suspect Satoshi knew this weakness and didn't emphasize it on purpose.
Note Dan's DPoS "solution" is centralized control as well, so it is not like Dan found a solution. He just made the centralization more efficient before Bitcoin does. One could argue that DPoS with a competitive distribution is at least the same as democracy (unlike Steem which is authoritarianism), but democracy is what we were trying to eliminate with blockchains, because it is a power vacuum.
