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

[Warren Smith]

On 6/17/11, Duane Johnson <duane.johnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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

--I'm serious.   All decent work in cryptography is based on the gap
between polynomial
and exponential time -- the encryptors do polynomial work, and the
crackers need to do exponential work.  That, if achieved, is huge
security.  It's a totally unfair fight.

    This Bitcoin thing, however (according to that quote and I've seen
similar quotes by the author of bitcoin), is based on nothing anywhere
close to that gap, it's just the good team vs the bad team and whoever
has the most compute power wins.
That's basically a fair fight.   (And further, I need to believe in
the author of bitcoin
in making even that lame assertion, which implies he has proved optimality
of his runtime constant factors, as opposed to a much less precise but safer
notion like "no polytime algorithm exists."   Basically, nobody can prove
or even make a plausible conjecture about optimality of constant
factors for anything nontrivial, so I don't even believe the bitcoin
guy even when
he makes this lame assertion.)

I am not exaggerating then, when I describe the difference between these two
security notions, as the difference between good work, and garbage by
incompetent frauds -- and furthermore, the bitcoiners are probably not
only giving us an ultra-lame claimed result, but one that also is just
wrong, i.e. it is not merely a weak statement, but actually a lie.

Stay away from bitcoin, that is my advice.
"A fool and his money, are easily parted."

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