Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
TPTB_need_war
on 01/07/2015, 23:46:44 UTC
Justus and rocks, I am going to address your two recent posts...but in a whitepaper.

Rocks you brush off centralization due to spamming the mining network without even considering it deeply. I've developed a model of centralization which is more scientific.

From the perspective of a Bitcoin user, every possible thing that can go wrong with Bitcoin can be categorized into one of two failure modes:

  • A payment you belive to be valid, isn't (double spend)
  • You are unable to perform a payment that you want to perform (denial of service)

Users may have other requirements including but not limited to:

  • Anonymity of identity, linkability, traceability, and or value transferred.
  • Expediency of transfer.
  • Protection of store-of-value, which can include decentralized control over debasement, inability to do malfeasance which causes a run on the coins, etc.
  • Protection of fungibility.

Thus you can see your piecemeal model isn't going to work. You need a more general model of decentralization.



+1.  Justus, I've been reading some of your work and I really like your push to clearly and precisely define the cryptocurrency terms we're using.  Here's what I had jotted down yesterday, which sort of jives with the two points you made above:

   Bitcoin is decentralized if no entity exists with the ability to costlessly double-spend or bar valid transactions from the blockchain.

Thoughts?

You are describing one of the effects of decentralization, but not decentralization itself.