[EM] A secure distributed election scheme based on Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work protocol

[Warren Smith]

>As Satoshi's original Bitcoin paper showed, it becomes exponentially improbable that any attacker controlling less than 50% of the total CPU power could manufacture a verifiable chain that is longer than the longest one that is produced collaboratively by the P2P network.

--I'm pretty unfamiliar with bitcoin but I consider this "security
guarantee" to be pretty
worthless.   If I join an e-money scheme, then dammit I do NOT want to
be cranking
my computer day and night in a a desperate battle to stay secure by
expending more cycles than the bad guys.  I want to do some
computation ONCE whenever I get or pay some money, then stop forever,
and I still want permanent security against all the compute power in
the universe for the life of the universe.  Many cryptographic
protocols, including multiparty and voting and e-money protocols,
already exist with the level of security I just described (under the
usual assumptions, such as integer factoring is way hard).

It is quite plausible in a bitcoin scheme with a million participants,
that some "bad guy" team will spend an enormous amount of computing
24/7 in parallel trying to break it, while meanwhile the "good guys"
do nothing with their computers because they are interested in using
their computers for other purposes.  Or in turning them off.

I consider bitcoin, if this is all the security it has, to be garbage proposed
by incompetents.



-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html