TD₿: Fact Check: DARPA Funded Report on Blockchain Centralization by Yan Pritzker and Tomer Strolight
TL;DR DARPA's Bitcoin analysis is filled with misconceptions and failed to give context on how their proposed attacks are feasible in the real world.
Hey Bitcoiners,
Earlier in the week, a report funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was released titled “Are Blockchains Decentralized?”.
The piece was filled with misconceptions on how Bitcoin works and it displayed a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin achieves consensus through aligning the incentives of all participants involved including the nodes, miners, and developers.
The government-funded research attempted to explore different potential attack vectors but failed to give context to the attacks and their achievability and consequences in the real world.
One example is when they described a 51% attack. The authors seem to believe that this would allow an attacker to somehow obtain more bitcoin out of thin air which simply is not the case. Furthermore, they write as if this would be a one-time attack when in reality a 51% attack needs to be maintained forever which is extremely costly to pull off.
Learn more about where the DARPA research falls short in this blog post written by Yan Pritzker and Tomer Strolight that systematically breakdowns 13 claims from the report (06/22/2022).
It’s important to call out shortcomings in FUD pieces like this so that we can better educate people on how Bitcoin works, and perhaps one day we can get research that adequately critiques Bitcoin’s security so that we can use those critiques to improve it.
In short — Bitcoin really deserves better critics.
Tick tock next block,
Cory Klippsten
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Quote of the Day
“Bitcoin's security properties are amazing. For example, one really great aspect of proof-of-work consensus is that if a 51% attacker decides to orphan blocks from honest miners then the difficulty will adjust downward up to 50%.” - Steve Barbour, President at Upstream Data
Meme of the Day
Get em Tomer ! Let’s go Yan! I appreciate your understanding and communication of what bitcoin is and can be more than you imagine. Never stop slaying fud and giving hope.