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This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 24 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)
I certainly hope you're right about the proof of work going away - it does seem a terrible waste. An alternative would be using the heat for something useful - but CPUs generally run at such low temperatures that it wouldn't be good for much beyond space heaters.
As for the transaction rate - I don't know if Bitcoin specifically could securely scale as dramatically as I suggested, but it's currently limited primarily by two fairly arbitrary limits: the proof of work difficulty automatically scales to maintain roughly one block every 10 minutes, and blocks are limited to only 1MB in size. You might get into security problems lowering the proof of work time too much, but experimental forks have already shown that the block size can be increased to at least 1GB without problems. That's a 1000x increase in transaction rate right there.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)
See, I think proof of work is a sham - important in the psychological adoption of the system, value of the coin (I worked hard for this, spent money, I'm not giving it away for nothing...), but... the bitcoin network is also vulnerable to timejacking attacks even with proof of work, and if you can prevent timejacking, do you really need proof of work? All you need is trust in your servers that compute and publish the blockchain, and if a server proves un-trustworthy they have burned their future income... As long as a majority of the servers in the network remain trustworthy, the bad actors should fall away.
Ethereum may be on to something, trusting those who hold coin. A sham server that cannot point to escrowed coin should not be trusted with transactions larger than the coin they stand to lose (because: if they process a double-spend of some coin, they can just disappear into the ether, and who's to say that the shady processor isn't also the double-spender IRL?) When there's a critical mass of servers who have sufficient historical record and skin in the game, that should be enough to keep the network going.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
Proof-of-stake certainly has some merits, but the fact that it inherently concentrates power in the hands of the greatest stakeholders makes me a little dubious about it's value as a democratizing force in finance, which was once of the big appeals of Bitcoin in the early days. Of course as we've seen, proof of work isn't much (if any) better - power concentrates in the hands of those who can afford to buy the most mining nodes.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:43PM
I inherently agree, the motivators are key because without a strong base of transaction processors no system is going to work.
However, a system need-not require proof-of-stake, it could be an option to the persons performing the transaction, if I'm going to trust this "miner" to handle my transaction (ensure that it is valid and recorded in _the_ blockchain), I have the option to check out their (disclosed) holdings - and I might not choose to process a 10 coin transaction through a processor that is only disclosing 0.0001 of coin holdings from that one transaction they processed 30 minutes ago.
There are always problems, chief among these I see is miners might opt to freeze out new miners who don't demonstrate enough stake - the only motivation I can see for this is to eliminate competition, but... that's a pretty big one.
🌻🌻 [google.com]