Very interesting post from the cofounder of the most popular bitcoin wallet and US exchange.
It definitely agrees with my hypothesis. I just can't believe the extent to which bitcoin's injuries have been self-inflicted by its lead dev team. TBH I suspect that there is much more to the story, and that governments are involved. Everything from the deception practiced by the core devs, the sockpuppet-like legion in /r/bitcoin, and things like the big hash spike that I mentioned in my other comment leads me to believe that there is orchestration. A non-governmental currency controlled by Chinese miners is a reasonable target.
> controlled This is the problem with this tech, isn't it? Got to read up on my game theory but my bugsense says bitcoin is deep state tech. Anyway, have a question regarding the "turing complete" aspect of Ethereum and hope you can save me time to read :) Where do these scripts execute? If on the exchange node, then how is this a good thing? Turing complete languages preclude full static analysis. Thus, denial of service is an option.
I doubt it started as state tech, but there can be little doubt that miners in China operate only with the permission, and likely guidance, of the CCP. Bitcoin was first banned in China, and then it was not. That's why I think Western countermeasures are a possibility. Each execution is a transaction logged on every node. Which of course makes for a very inefficient virtual machine. DOS is difficult, as it has to prevent propagation across the entire network. Of course, you could target one node and affect their ability to transact. Executing transactions costs ETH, so loops become expensive. On a somewhat related note, Ethereum is slated to move to proof-of-stake to replace the proof-of-work mining that takes place now. There is a hard-coded difficulty bomb that will increase the hash rate exponentially with the intention that miners cannot prevent a hardfork by not adopting the software. We shall see how that goes. I worry that the miners could introduce their own hardfork that removes the difficulty bomb.Where do these scripts execute? If on the exchange node, then how is this a good thing? Turing complete languages preclude full static analysis. Thus, denial of service is an option.
My impression is that they are going to be hobbled by bitcoin rather than fueled by it. Bitcoin is not optimized for smart contracts, and as such XCP only has bitcoin's mining security to gain, but at a high technical cost. I remember when they burned a couple of thousand BTC in 2014 for creation of XCP. They probably should have gone with the more controversial route of an initial coin offering, and used the BTC for development. Rootstock has similar issues. If Ethereum wasn't at the place it is now, I think both would be more compelling, but Ethereum has enough marketshare and mindshare that there isn't much reason to go with a bitcoin hybrid for smart contracts.Btw, do you have the skinny on Counterparty?
Interesting. Core devs left & have a company now: http://symbiont.io/ but that looks like it is also riding on top of BC.
Bitcoin is a dumpster fire. Yesterday it took me three hours to get BTC from a wallet to an exchange. That made the decision to sell it for ETH that much easier. Interestingly, the hash rate had a huge spike in the last couple of days, and blocks were solved faster than average. that means that the difficulty just adjusted that much higher. Now that the hash pulled back, blocks are going to confirm that much more slowly. I think someone with a lot of hash power is fucking with bitcoin. Blocks are full. It's not going to get better.