Litecoin founder talks about cryptocurrency risks | Hacker News Reader

Litecoin founder talks about cryptocurrency risks

viraldocks.com

65 pointsviraldocks32 comments

Was encouraged but disappointed that proponents still ignore the risk that cryptographic hashes are reliant on unsolved mathematics

That's one worrying part. The one I'm more scared about is: it's not all clear to me what would happen if the network gets suddenly partitioned. With China apparently having a big chunk of the mining power, what would happen if they decide to isolate all those miners via the 'Great Firewall'? And what happens if they keep mining, and after a few months the Firewall gates get re-opened?

My understanding is that the miners are important, without them you can't have a 'liquid market' of transactions, is that right? What's the risk if you loose a huge chunk of miners overnight?

The real problem would be if some group of people gathered a mining majority. Losing a huge chunk of miners overnight would have just a short effect, till the network adapts the difficulty.

Yeah the famous '51% attacks'.

I read some of the online resources in the subject, including the one swinglock mentions[1]. And yeah the answers are a bit outdated, like the 2013 on: 'As for the merge, this is still being discussed and we do not have a good contingency plan'. The answer seems to be the 'longest chain wins' ... so that's not a 100% convincing answer.

Is there a way to know the distribution of nodes per country?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172

Whichever chain's the deepest wins when they reunite, right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172

Isn't basically all security around us built upon the same "unsolved mathematics"?

I've heard this response before, but do you really feel it addresses the issue? Or are you just utilising whataboutism to cloud the issue?

This is a matter of people refinancing their homes, and funds putting money into futures of an asset that has potentially always been valueless

But to answer your question: yes, that bothers me too;

If things like SHA-256, RSA or ECDSA go down, we will have a much more serious trouble than the broken Bitcoin. This is the foundation of the internet security, it protects not only Bitcoin, but also online banking, email and HN.

Agree that there would be far-reaching consequences but remember that banking existed prior to the invention of electricity. We could go back to the old system even though it would be immensely inefficient by comparison. The same can’t be said of crypto currencies.

Banking did exist, but not in a form that is likely to be at all palatable to modern society. The breakdown of currency would have devastating impacts on social trust.

Btc 'goes down' that's, at the time of writing this, ~300B of who knows what vanishes

Hn 'goes down' and we have to worry about mitm attacks while we information dope?

seriously though, I am concerned about 'online banking, email and hn' too, but I'm also concerned about btc

I wonder what percentage of people invested in btc are unaware of the complexity consequence of their investment?

Perhaps similar to the percentage of people who read hn without understanding https?

I would like to see this be information everybody knows because it is recited to them repeatedly

Especially if we are going to be 'talking about cryptocurrency risks'

What do you propose? Just not doing anything that matters over a wire? Seems like we're back to 1850 for little evident benefit.

Litecoin uses scrypt and mutliple rounds of sha-256 for the proof of work. Are you referring to cryptographic signatures in general?

the hash functions are robust, though collisions are a concern

But my greater concern is in regard to nonce detection

> the hash functions are robust, though collisions are a concern

you are more likely to be eaten alive by ants, than witness a sha-256 collision with today's hardware

> But my greater concern is in regard to nonce detection

what does this mean? nonces here are used to prevent duplicate transactions.

But probabilities are subjective, if you build your home on a anthill your scenario's probability increases

Nonces are used to find hashes that satisfy a specific 'target' requirement

>collisions are a concern

Could you elaborate? Probability of collisions should be very low.

Unsolved mathematics? Can you elaborate what you mean?

Complexity theory's interest in determining if there is a polynomial time algorithm to solve any npcomplete problem

Isn't a bigger issue is that computers are getting faster and thus hashes are faster to calculate?

To be fair, there is zero reason to think we will ever "solve" mathematics in the way you indicate.

One must-have feature of all cryptocurrencies should be privacy. Only a few support full anonymity today.

a few support full anonymity today.

And of those, one more than others.

Monero ftw

Didnt want to promote any, but yes, monero is better than others.

Maybe someone's anticipating some massive selling by folks who own a lot. Perhaps some of those folks are known personally to Lee, or includes Lee himself. I suppose he'll be able to say, I told you so.

Lets upvote a postive article on crypto, not always the negative ones.

It's nice to see some big warnings about the volatility of crypto from such established players, and the type of corrections that are envisaged. It is really important to understand how risky an asset class they are.

I am not a bitcoin fan by any means, but this is an incredibly low quality article.

"Good regulation would be good. BTC is really volatile. People use it to speculate, not transact. ICOs are a great way to get burnt."

I suppose it's worth saying, but I don't think it'll convince the faithful.

I agree with you. These days, the situation changes dramatically but, the world's trend go "Virtual Currency market" This article said, "virtual currencyt gaining popularity" http://www.galesburg.com/news/20171215/virtual-currency-gain...

Still needs to be said. And lots. I'm a crypto investor, but i know what it feels like to have an 80% correction over the space of a year. There are a lot of people who don't even think that's possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com