[136810] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Satoshi Nakamoto)
Mon Nov 3 14:45:41 2008
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:23:49 +0800
From: "Satoshi Nakamoto" <satoshi@vistomail.com>
Reply-To: satoshi@vistomail.com
To: johnl@iecc.com
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
>> As long as honest nodes control the most CPU power on the network,
>> they can generate the longest chain and outpace any attackers.
>
>But they don't. Bad guys routinely control zombie farms of 100,000
>machines or more. People I know who run a blacklist of spam sending
>zombies tell me they often see a million new zombies a day.
>
>This is the same reason that hashcash can't work on today's Internet
>-- the good guys have vastly less computational firepower than the bad
>guys.
Thanks for bringing up that point.
I didn't really make that statement as strong as I could have. The requ=
irement is that the good guys collectively have more CPU power than any =
single attacker.=20
There would be many smaller zombie farms that are not big enough to over=
power the network, and they could still make money by generating bitcoin=
s. The smaller farms are then the "honest nodes". (I need a better ter=
m than "honest") The more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, =
the higher the bar gets to overpower the network, making larger farms al=
so too small to overpower it so that they may as well generate bitcoins =
too. According to the "long tail" theory, the small, medium and merely =
large farms put together should add up to a lot more than the biggest zo=
mbie farm.
Even if a bad guy does overpower the network, it's not like he's instant=
ly rich. All he can accomplish is to take back money he himself spent, =
like bouncing a check. To exploit it, he would have to buy something fr=
om a merchant, wait till it ships, then overpower the network and try to=
take his money back. I don't think he could make as much money trying =
to pull a carding scheme like that as he could by generating bitcoins. =
With a zombie farm that big, he could generate more bitcoins than everyo=
ne else combined.
The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms=
to generating bitcoins instead.
Satoshi Nakamoto
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