When I ran across “Why Bitcoin’s Anonymity Could Soon Collapse Like A House of Cards,” apparently from The Physics arXiv Blog, in Discover, I looked forward to learning about possible weaknesses in Bitcoin. Instead, though, I was distracted by all the mistakes and typos. Shall we take a quick look?
Bitcoin’s remarkable growth in value is a curious story. Launched in March 2009 worth $0, Bitcoin reached parity with the dollar in September 2011. In November last year it peaked in value at over $60,000 and at the time of writing its worth has collapsed to around $20,000.
Remarkably vague and even useless. Are we talking total worth of all Bitcoins? Per Bitcoin? While, given the last value, I know it’s per Bitcoin, someone approaching this cold would be completely baffled.
In its early days, Bitcoin was particularly vulnerable to a kind of exploit called a “51 per cent attack”, which allows individuals or groups working together to spend the same Bitcoins repeatedly. So economists are curious about why nobody gamed the system to take more for themselves, particularly when Bitcoin’s anonymity would have protected them.
Question, question, I have a question: If you have the power to rewrite history, is it not possible to rewrite history so no one realizes it’s been rewritten? Asking for a friend.
First, some background. Bitcoin is a digital currency in which transactions are continually recorded this list encrypted so it cannot easily be changed. This forms a block. The next list of transactions includes this block which are again encrypted, creating a “blockchain”.
Well, that’s a garbled mess. My understanding is that one or more transactions make up a block, which is then added to the blockchain, which is replicated throughout the supporting network of computing platforms.
The encryption process is computationally expensive. So anybody who performs this encryption is rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin. This process is called mining.
No, No, No! Mining is a competitive process in which the first to the goal gets the coin, and the energy consumed by failed competitors is wasted. This is part, perhaps the major part, to be concerned about the existence of all cryptocurrencies using this approach.
The blockchain is published on a distributed ledger so it can be publicly verified. Any mistakes or errors or disagreements about the list of transactions are resolved by majority. This makes the transaction records secure because, in ordinary circumstances, no one individual can change the majority of the blockchain copies.
Majority what? Come on. I’m not even going to bother with a joke here.
Well, that appears to be it for typos and misunderstandings, but it really does raise questions about how well the author(s) understand the topic. I think it’s interesting that anonymization on the Bitcoin network may be flawed, but I won’t blog about it extensively until a second source shows up.
If they even got that right.
