Blockhead

One thing’s for sure, the Block-chain model does not pass the Occam’s razor test. It ain’t elegant, mate.

You can see what happened. Satoshi had an idea to use bit-torrent file sharing as the basis for a new digital currency; he introduced the idea of a universal encrypted bank ledger shared by all with bit-torrent, in order to get rid of the banks and governments from currency.

Then he turned to hashing with SHA-256 (ironically a US government encryption algorithm) to ensure irreversibility and anonymity of the ledger, as well as the root of the solution to avoid double spending.

And on it went; he responded to each weakness and objection to the model with a new complex add on.

The result; a dog’s breakfast that few truly understand. Not surprisingly the whole thing is becoming bogged down under the weight of its own complexity and the sheer size of the ledger.

Glibly Satoshi assured himself that Moore’s law was outpacing Bitcoin, so all would be OK. But he wasn’t aware that Intel would subtly redefine Moore’s Law, so as to ensure chips wouldn’t self-combust at some point.

I believe that that a better model will emerge in time, one that does away with the power hungry computational requirements of Bitcoin.

Trust isn’t such a bad thing. Perhaps it needs to be re-examined in the digital age.