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

[Duane Johnson]

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

A fairly strong reaction to a new idea. If it is truly garbage, it will come
to naught. But if not, perhaps there is something to be learned.

Duane

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Warren Smith <warren.wds at gmail.com> wrote:

> >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<http://math.temple.edu/%7Ewds/homepage/works.html>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
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