Quote from: Gavin Andresen on March 18, 2012, 04:12:07 PM

If your argument is "But Gavin, if core Bitcoin doesn't support One True Way of doing I'll never be able to convince miners to do it my way!" then I'd say you need to better express to them how the benefits of your proposal outweigh the costs.

This. Math gives us tools to create complex and useful games, but there is no Unified Theory of Finance. Managing the integrity of the blockchain will require whatever-works-at-the-time schemes to check and balance real world complications. Multiple schemes in combination and moderation can be used to adapt the Bitcoin Network if there is a sudden threat to the balance of power. The important thing is that the network propogates fluidly and globally.

Quote from: TT on March 18, 2012, 03:49:43 PM

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Huh? You make it sound so easy. I suppose that just because The USA got the most medals in the last Olympics that we should just stop having them. Oh, and because the USA has enough nuclear bombs to blow up the world, everyone else should stop building nuclear weapons. Are you afraid of a little competition?

No, but thanks for throwing in a nice strawman.

I'm suggesting something along the lines of what people like Dan Kaminsky have suggested: that it would be possible to have proof-of-work that cannot be massively accelerated with GPUs or ASICs...but that has high memory and serialization dependencies or other resource requirements, too.

http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/bitcoin-8776098

My point is that I'm really not afraid of a massive 51% attack because having such a weapon doesn't justify actually using it. It is more likely that someone will have the means of stopping the attack and restoring the game back to a healthy competition. Inventing new technologies that take extreme advantage of anything are the hardest secrets to keep.