Re: Gavin Andresen - State of the Union - Bitcoin 2013 Conference

On 29 May 2013 17:18, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 05/29/2013 08:35 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> > Includes payment protocol using X.509 certificates :)
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfF5mJDgZWc&feature=youtu.be
>
> At one point he says: "If you want to invent a better PKI solution,
> please do." That might be a place where Web Keys could help. :)
>
> I'm also confused as to why there isn't more work to do some
> better modeling of ecommerce transactions in Bitcoin. For example,
> marking up assets, listings, and digital contracts. Most of the work
> tends to focus on the core infrastructure (which is fine, but kinda
> misses the point of what's needed to make Bitcoin more palatable as a
> medium for economic exchange). I think the two biggest problems right
> now are 1) the delay it takes to verify a transaction, and 2) the lack
> of a good digital contract/receipt mechanism. If Bitcoin gets those two
> things addressed, it'll become a very powerful mechanism for economic
> value exchange.
>
> The other thing that confuses me is why the system was built
> independently of the Web. It seems to me that a decent bit of work is
> going into re-inventing the wheel in core Bitcoin infrastructure (things
> like identity, identifiers, message passing, etc.).
>
> I'm also curious to see if Bitcoin is going to try and make the system
> currency agnostic. As we all know, that would sort of defeat the purpose
> of the Bitcoin currency... but providing the software to governments
> that issue their own fiat currency would be an interesting experiment.
> It would mean that governments could operate without a banking system
> for value exchange.
>
> The other thing that really struck me about the video is how genuine
> Gavin Andresen comes across as when he talks about many of the aspects
> covered in the video. I think Bitcoin has a great spokesman in Gavin,
> and that's going to take the community much further than it would get
> without him.
>
> There was a story I read recently about the real power of the Bitcoin
> community not being the actual currency itself, but rather being a
> gathering place for like-minded currency hackers. If Gavin exemplifies
> core members of the Bitcoin community, it's certainly something that I
> think will have a very positive long-term impact on our global economic
> system.
>

In a nutshell, web people and P2P people tend to have very different
philosophies.  As a consequence, the intersection tends to be very small,
and hence, cross communication.

It's important to note that there is a non trivial trade off here between
scalability and performance.  Bitcoin is very tightly designed to save
space, yet still the block chain takes up c. 7GB and is growing.  To change
local identifiers (which are kind of like ASN.1) into fully namespaced URIs
would have a significant cost in terms of performance.  Remember that
bitcoin distributes trust by replicating the transactions over a large
number of servers.

The downside is that bitcoin doesnt scale so easily to other ecosysetems.
e.g. RSA would be very hard to work with bitcoin due to key length being an
order of magnitude bigger.  Using HTTP URIs would be too verbose, and the
verification relies on the identifiers being mathematically related to the
private key, breaking the web opacity axiom (but in a good way!).  Similar
things apply to multiple currencies, but there's solutions in terms of "alt
coins" and ripple which is multi currency.

Ultimately I think that most people have enough on their plate already than
to learn TWO (web + crypto currencies) new paradigms, when one is hard
enough.  Sort of a pity, because I think of the web and bitcoin as two of
most ingenious systems built on the internet, and I'd love to see them come
closer together... hopefully some of us can work on that!

CC: Gavin Andresen


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
> http://blog.meritora.com/launch/
>
>