Re: defending ahead the p2p nature of bitcoin - blending hashcash & scrypt
The timestamp chain could still be based on sha256.
And, that would be a kind of "institutional" commitment in a loose sense - informal and unspoken one, but commitment nonetheless.
If you decide to move away from SHA256, you'd have a bunch of very upset participants, who will at that point become fairly confrontational.
Attacker hires [unethical hacker] to enter BTC dev circles, contribute, gain team trust, and eventually sneak a remote code execution vulnerability (disguised as a honest coding mistake, of course) into main.
I dont think you even need a lot of money for that, the grey/black hat hacker just does it as his own project... There ought to be some really serious scrutiny of every byte every check-in. Maybe bitcoin should think about paying a bounty for the bugs out of some slush even.
Some of those guys ranging through black, grey to white hackers are very very smart. If they can find new 0-days, in highly reviewed code, and sell it on the grey (legit actually) market - they are well qualified to know what a subtle mistake looks like, and how one would create one.
Well, having a lot of money allows you to pay the blackhat a really nice salary to ensure he devotes all his efforts to compromising BTC from "team insider" position, and the blackhat gets to keep all the coins he gains from sneaking a remote code execution exploit into BTC.
Which, I reckon, would be an offer few blackhats would decline.
The sheer effort needed to detect - and neutralize - such an attack would be tremendous.
So if we are really consider a non-economically motivated attacker with millions of dollars to spare, exotic chippery is the least of our concerns (I'd say outright implausible, given the amount of non-cryptographic shortcut attacks a rich monomaniac can undertake)
And yes, we need a "bug bounty" and a generally more robust change review process.
Ok you called me on that. Your points are valid also IMO. I was mostly reacting to the 'one-two teak clones' as you put it that are basically 100% bitcoin with paramtweaks. I should have qualified that with simple no difference forks. Otherwise why would each person not start the same code or a paramtweak metoocoin etc in their own name and go for the first mover coins until there are 100k coins types and the concept of a cryptocurrency gets weakened by the noise! Its confusing to the semi-technical viewer and erodes the meaning of a cryptocurrency. But yes part of an experiment is potentially the economics which maybe you cant really tell without operating it.
There are limitations with bitcoin, things that could be improved, maybe crytpographic and/or p2p optimizations perhaps that could jump scalability up, reduce network requirements of peers, etc
Different mining and decentralization retaining features etc.
The research and experimentation brings value. Maybe in the longer term bitcoin would merge an innovation to improve. And worse cast, yes a monoculture defense, if bitcoin lost its way.
The first mover thing is odd though. No one knows if an alt-coin will perhaps for some unforseen reason overtake, if bitcoin hits a big stumbling block people didnt see coming.
Adam
Well, there won't even necessarily be an overtake.
I expect BTC and decent alties to specialize to different market segments, with BTC being more mainstream and some altcoins taking up niches that a "mainstream cryptocurrency" doesn't fit quite as well (if at all)
There's no particular reason why There Should Be Only ONE
.And don't get me started on Bitcoinomics...
Having said that, there's you know, a certain gap between "cryptocurrency ideas" and capacity to implement them.
Altcoins need more level-headed professionals, good designers, and perhaps most importantly, cryptography experts involved.