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

[Warren Smith]

On 6/18/11, Mike Frank <michael.patrick.frank at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bitcoin has experienced up-and-down fluctuations in value by more than 40%
> quite regularly.  It dropped by more than 50% just last week.  Yet, the
> longer-term trend is still that its value (and the computing power devoted
> to it) is increasing at more than 2x per month (10x per calendar quarter).
>  The bitcoin network has grown by 10x for each of the last 6 consecutive
> quarters, and currently does it more ops/s than the Top 500 supercomputers
> put together!
>
> For any particular group of "bad guys" to collaborate with each other to
> command more than 50% of this amount of computational power for any
> significant length of time (sufficient to corrupt the chain) seems like an
> extremely unlikely proposition to me - especially in light of Jameson's
> point.  Any putative attackers would profit more by mining bitcoins
> cooperatively with the system.
>
> I therefore find Bitcoin's security guarantees to be quite convincing...
>
> -Mike

--good grief.  "Proof of security" by looking at a graph of gold
prices versus time.
("It seems to be going up despite severe fluctuations.") I'll stay
with old fashioned notions of cryptographic security, thank you...  I
see no need for this kind of "advance
of the field."