Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
raid_n
on 27/02/2014, 08:56:46 UTC
Turing completeness is a horrible idea for scripting in a cryptocurrency. Just look at the past couple of decades of vulnerabilities in java, javascript, flash, etc, etc.  Turing complete money will drain your wallet on it's own.

The only thing I can see stopping it is another cryptocurrency which accomplishes everything that Bitcoin does and more, only with a codebase so different that Bitcoin can not adopt these added desirable features.

May I ask how important you feel Turing completeness is in the scripting language?

I'm sorry, I do not have the technical knowledge to answer this question. Give me a few days and I may be able to give you an answer.

+1

These are good points too.  Turing completeness in a scripting language means that "anything computable, can be computed by running the appropriate script."  So there is an infinite surface of potential problems that would slowly show themselves, I think.  The Java exploits are a good analogy.  

just think about something like  
{ while true; }
in the scripting language. I send you such a transaction. Will your machine lock up in an endless loop?

[edit] just to point out the irony in this. If the scripting language is turing complete there will always be the possibility of
implementing non-terminating code. And because of the halting problem you can't deterministically decide if a piece of code
is going to terminate or not.