Re:Auroracoin – Forked and Game Over
by olalonde on Saturday March 29, 2014 @07:21PM
(#7494398)
> My prediction is that at the end there will be an epiphany that our real world currency system is constructed the way it is for a reason.
This line of reasoning is sketchy at best given that a "decentralized ledger" could not have possibly been considered as an option when the current system was built (it was not known such a system could even exist). If you had said the same thing about email in the early days ("my prediction is that our real world mail system is constructed the way it is for a reason") you would have been dead wrong.
> So, you're saying that there should be some kind of powerful institution that is capable of defending the currency against manipulation attempts if necessary and thus ensures a reasonable level of stability in said currency?
There is a distinction to be made between a central bank that is controlled by an individual country (which may or may not be accountable to its population) and a decentralized institution that is ruled by mathematic, totally transparent and spans multiple countries.
There are also ways around the potential 51% attack threat for smaller crypto-currencies which include piggy backing off Bitcoin's network hashing power (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merg...) or using Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work.
This line of reasoning is sketchy at best given that a "decentralized ledger" could not have possibly been considered as an option when the current system was built (it was not known such a system could even exist). If you had said the same thing about email in the early days ("my prediction is that our real world mail system is constructed the way it is for a reason") you would have been dead wrong.
> So, you're saying that there should be some kind of powerful institution that is capable of defending the currency against manipulation attempts if necessary and thus ensures a reasonable level of stability in said currency?
There is a distinction to be made between a central bank that is controlled by an individual country (which may or may not be accountable to its population) and a decentralized institution that is ruled by mathematic, totally transparent and spans multiple countries.
There are also ways around the potential 51% attack threat for smaller crypto-currencies which include piggy backing off Bitcoin's network hashing power (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merg...) or using Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work.