Everyone’s doing it, here are my notes and links; the original founding white paper is here! https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. This was first written in 2015, and has been added to several times.

The Government have started to talk about a central bank digital currency. This led me to look for and find Bruce Schneier’s piece, On the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain , in which he says,

“By its very design, blockchain technology is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated financial transactions and are not an improvement on existing non-blockchain solutions.”

Bruce Schneier, his blog

Originally found in 2015,

  1. This http://gendal.me/ is Richard Brown’s blog, he is IBM’s Bitcoin guru.
  2. This http://www.thefinanser.com/ is Chris Skinner’s blog recommended to me by a friend, he writes about bitcoin quite frequently.
  3. Tony Arcieri in an article on his blog entitled, The death of bitcoin,  says, “I think Bitcoin is actually succeeding just fine for now (although the hype may be out of proportion with its actual success).”
  4. Chami Akmeemana, writes at linked in, in an article entitled, Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Disintermediation of Trust ,  says “Block chains are distributed databases, using sophisticated cryptography and consensus to ensure end-to-end transactional integrity without the need for a trusted central party.”

On 24th Dec 2017. I wrote a review of some articles I found. I said, that, there is a long diatribe at Hacker Noon about the Bitcoin bubble and the blockchain hype. I had been considering writing something similar although my focus was on the excessive use  & cost of electricity to “mine” coins and the demonstrable industrialisation and economic consolidation of the mining operations.

I returned to this in July 2020 inspired provoked/inspired by Ron Ballard’s article and presentation, “Blockchain: the facts and the fiction“, his presentation took me to some further reading,

  1. Investopedia on 51% Attack
  2. Investopedia on Proof of Work
  3. Wikipedia on Proof of Work
  4. Unchained Capital on the indivisibility of bitcoin & blockchain.
  5. VPN Mentor on immutability. Is it? Yes, No, practically yes!
  6. Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure, the paper that defined the proof of work
  7. https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/hash-puzzle-bitcoin/, a simple explanation of the bitcoin proof of work
  8. http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin-mining-hard-way-algorithms.html, more on mining inc. code.
  9. Understanding_Bitcoins_Facts_and_Questions, … a research … about the digital currency named Bitcoins, as well as exploit the general concept behind digital currencies and cryptocurrencies, and enumerate some of its current criticism and problems. Such currencies usage and public knowledge is increasing hastily on the last few months, and many questions arise with its popularity. by Bruno Saboia de Albuquerque, Marcelo de Castro Callado
  10. Miners and Masternodes: Dash’s Two-Tier Blockchain Architecture , a discussion of Dash which has broken the mining function into parts, the article says, “Masternodes represent a second, more superior layer of governance that not only helps with providing quicker transactions (InstaSend), and private transactions (PrivateSend), but also acts as an overseeing democratic mechanism. Masternode holders can vote on issues affecting the network and take part in activities like conflict resolution.” Not sure if this is like “A” & “B” shares nor if we are introducing trust as the sensitive decisions are taken by masternodes. This article also describes how to get started,
  11. Consensus-mechanism-cryptocurrency , at investopedia multiple consensus mechanisms
  12. Decoding the ‘Bitcoin Revolution’, a podcast, by Ben Vikers, Jaya Klara Brekke and Paul Mason with both discussion and promotion of Vikers and Brekke’s book.

When testing my 2020 research against previous findings, I checked out what I was saying about P2P DNS and namecoin, I was pointed at merged mining which would be an amendment to the proof of work algorithms.

One thing that threatens the immutability of the blockchain would be an order of magnitude change in the power/cost of computing ( terms of money and watts/mips). Here is an article about Quantum Computing and blockchain, Ripple Executive Says Quantum Computing Will Threaten Bitcoin, XRP and Crypto Markets – Here’s When

5 Replies

  1. I also wonder that as mining gets harder, and is rewarded less, as it does by design, will the miners take their computers away to another crypto-currency.

  2. Pingback: rchain.coop |
  3. Decrypt reports Yannis Varofakis declaring that Bitcoin is not fit to replace fiat money, and in his own words.

    TLDR The public/govt can’t apply monetary policy to bitcoin. I say, this is by design.

    He also talks about the wealth redistribution factor, it is not possible to redistribute wealth in the block chain. I say, this is also by design.

    We can’t replace the thing we measure its value in. (This is part of the welfare economics argument.)

    I remind everyone, that it only does 7 TPS and is asynchronous by design.

  4. If Bitcoin is only or mainly used for paying for the security of transactions, what happens when there are no more to issue. Surely the miners will go somewhere else and thus there can be no more transactions?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.