Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker. It is a very modern notion that exploits the power of the long tail. When Wikipedia started I never thought it would work, but it has proven to be a great success for some of the same reasons.
I also do think that there is potential value in a form of unforgeable token whose production rate is predictable and can't be influenced by corrupt parties. This would be more analogous to gold than to fiat currencies. Nick Szabo wrote many years ago about what he called "bit gold"[1] and this could be an implementation of that concept. There have also been proposals for building light-weight anonymous payment schemes on top of heavy-weight non-anonymous systems, so Bitcoin could be leveraged to allow for anonymity even beyond the mechanisms discussed in the paper. Unfortunately I am having trouble fully understanding the system. The paper describes key concepts and some data structures, but does not clearly specify the various rules and verifications that the participants in the system would have to follow. In particular I don't understand exactly what verifications P2P nodes perform when they receive new blocks from other nodes, and how they handle transactions that have been broadcast to them. For example, it is mentioned that if a broadcast transaction does not reach all nodes, it is OK, as it will get into the block chain before long. How does this happen - what if the node that creates the "next" block (the first node to find the hashcash collision) did not hear about the transaction, and then a few more blocks get added also by nodes that did not hear about that transaction? Do all the nodes that did hear it keep that transaction around, hoping to incorporate it into a block once they get lucky enough to be the one which finds the next collision? Or for example, what if a node is keeping two or more chains around as it waits to see which grows fastest, and a block comes in for chain A which would include a double-spend of a coin that is in chain B? Is that checked for or not? (This might happen if someone double-spent and two different sets of nodes heard about the two different transactions with the same coin.) This kind of data management, and the rules for handling all the packets that are flowing around is largely missing from the paper. I also don't understand exactly how double-spending, or cancelling transactions, is accomplished by a superior attacker who is able to muster more computing power than all the honest participants. I see that he can create new blocks and add them to create the longest chain, but how can he erase or add old transactions in the chain? As the attacker sends out his new blocks, aren't there consistency checks which honest nodes can perform, to make sure that nothing got erased? More explanation of this attack would be helpful, in order to judge the gains to an attacker from this, versus simply using his computing power to mint new coins honestly. As far as the spending transactions, what checks does the recipient of a coin have to perform? Does she need to go back through the coin's entire history of transfers, and make sure that every transaction on the list is indeed linked into the "timestamp" block chain? Or can she just do the latest one? Do the timestamp nodes check transactions, making sure that the previous transaction on a coin is in the chain, thereby enforcing the rule that all transactions in the chain represent valid coins? Sorry about all the questions, but as I said this does seem to be a very promising and original idea, and I am looking forward to seeing how the concept is further developed. It would be helpful to see a more process oriented description of the idea, with concrete details of the data structures for the various objects (coins, blocks, transactions), the data which is included in messages, and algorithmic descriptions of the procedures for handling the various events which would occur in this system. You mentioned that you are working on an implementation, but I think a more formal, text description of the system would be a helpful next step. Hal Finney [1] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
