Author: Alessandro Parisi 2013-11-05 18:55:45
Published on: 2013-11-05T18:55:45+00:00
In a conversation on the Bitcoin mailing list in 2013, Alessandro Parisi expressed his concern about bugs found in Bitcoin protocol. He believes that when such flaws are detected, immediate action should be taken to fix them, especially since the security of IT is of utmost importance. However, Jeff Garzik replied that Bitcoin is far more complex than standard IT security and blindly applying standard logic to it will quickly result in large problems. Garzik explained that distributed consensus is a new field of computer science, and every fix has the chance of changing the game theory or economics of Bitcoin. Moreover, a change to the core consensus protocol within Bitcoin -- mining -- is even more game-theory- and economically-critical to the core system. Therefore, any change potentially reduces Bitcoin's value to zero in the worst case. Garzik compared Bitcoin to medical device or avionics software and said that changes cannot be made at will without significant research, analysis, and testing. "It is a bug, it must be fixed ASAP" is ignorant and dangerous, he added. Furthermore, Garzik stated that the problem presented was theoretical at present, and the solution proposed had some obvious flaws that would make the current working system more fragile and less secure.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:23:25.385257+00:00