[WriteLog] WriteLog 11.22 released AND a special sale...

[Wayne, W5XD]

On 9/19/2014 13:27, k2qmf at 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