On 9/19/2014 13:27, k2qmf@juno.com wrote:
Hi,
This Bitcoin thing sounds like a big kludge to me.
And not very secure either!
I'll stick with good old PayPal..
73,
Ted K2QMF
"not very secure either!" deserves a comment.
The security design of bitcoin depends primarily on the coin owner's
ability to keep a secret. (More specifically, the owner's ability to
maintain the secrecy of her private keys). Bitcoin depends not at all on
anyone else's ability to keep a secret (have a look at, for example,
Home Depot and Target and how well they secure customer data. Consider
whether a bank where you keep your "money" is any more secure? And
whether your money is anything more than digital entries in someone
else's spreadsheet?)
By the way, cracking those private keys without stealing them is very
unlikely as well--it came out in the Snowden revelations that even NSA
hasn't found a crack--they have to steal them from unsecured computers
just like anyone else.
To be complete with everything I have studied, I have to also mention
there is a secondary security risk in bitcoin's design having to do with
the possibility of subverting the global transaction log ("the block
chain") but its designers were intent on making that more
computationally expensive to subvert than to contribute to honestly, The
bitcoin system pays its "miners". In order to subvert it, an attacker
must harness more compute power than all combined honest miners in the
network, and so over a sustained period of time amounting to many tens
of minutes. There are no known super computers that can accomplish
that--not by many orders of magnitude.
So when someone says bitcoin is not secure, the finger of accusation
really only points to one place.
Whether bitcoin is a "kludge" or not is an opinion and everyone is
entitled to one or more of those.
Wayne, W5XD
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