Thats it???? That's your rebuttal??
I guess there wasn't much you disagreed with then...
And yeah, this is a forum for people who are seeking financial independence, not a crypto fan-club. So, assuming the mods will still have me, I'll continue to giving advice I think will help advance people towards the goal of FI. This includes not speculating on cryptos. I do weigh in on other topics as well. Sometimes I agree with the consensus, sometimes not.
You know, for being on a financial independence forum, you certainly spend a lot of time hanging around these parts talking nothing but cryptos.
That was my rebuttal because that has already be discussed with you and it has been explained several times here and in the other Bitcoin threads which you were a part of why Bitcoin's blockchain is so secure.
You even had a post you created yourself here where you questioned this very topic of security with a clear misunderstand of how it all works:
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/things-i-don't-understand-about-bitcoin/Here you said:
"3.) It's secure... But for how long? Taking into account the ever increasing computing power, at what point will it be simple to brute-force into bitcoin wallets. The blockchain is a public ledger so I assume someone could download the whole thing and set a stable of computers against determining the private key for high value bitcoin wallets until they are cracked. With the exponential advance of computing power, i.e. Moore's Law, how far away are we really?"In another post, you said:
"I believe that the block-chain is growing exponentially such that at a certain point the power/energy required to continue to validate the blocks in the block chain will be impossibly large. At that point the network will collapse under its own weight and no new transactions will be validated."It seems like you have a misunderstanding on how the blockchain works and why it is so secure. As someone who works in Information Security, I will take to time to explain a few things for you.
Bitcoin's security comes from several specific areas and I'll list out the three of the most important ones:
1) Decentralization: Bitcoin's main security protection comes from the fact that it is a decentralized network. There are currently tens of thousands of bitcoin nodes around the world that each store their own copy of the entire blockchain and that validate and propagate blocks across the network to ensure they are valid blocks that meet all the rules of the network. This makes it theoretically impossible to hack the entire network. If there were a remote code execution vulnerability in the bitcoin core software, you'd be able to compromise and run code on that individual node itself, but the blockchain is public information, so there is no confidential data to steal. You could compromise the keys that are stored on that individual's node and potential steal bitcoin from one user, but that isn't a compromise that threatens the entire network. Contrast this to traditional centralized institutions that store massive amounts of confidential consumer information. Many of the data breaches that take place go unnoticed for months or even years, meanwhile millions of dollars are lost due to unauthorized transaction fraud because of these breaches. These damages are completely lost and unrecoverable, not unlike lost bitcoin are today. Most large companies that handle payment information now have cyber-security insurance to help pay for damages in the event of a breach to protect the consumers. This same protection can be applied to centralized bitcoin organizations. Insurance payouts can be used to return the stolen amounts of bitcoin back to consumers that lost it for those people that had bitcoin stored with centralized institutions. Breaches against central authorities that result in financial loss for consumers is not a critique against bitcoin, it is a critique against centralization. However, the Bitcoin network has a solution for this. It allows for users to take security into their own hands by giving them the power to own their private keys. This eliminates the central single point of failure inherent in our institutions today and makes it much more difficult for attackers to steal large amounts of funds from massive stockpiles of information.
2) Proof-of-work: Proof of work is what is used to include transactions onto the blockchain so that they're immutable and permanently stored as part of the transaction history for the public ledger. SHA256 is a hashing algorithm. Hashing algorithms are considered one-way encryption. That means that there is data loss involved in the process and the output can never be transformed back to the input that created it. That means the only viable method of retrieving the input from the output is to simply brute-force all possible combinations. For a primer on how secure 256-bit hashing is, here is a good video to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unYAlso, here is a snippet of text regarding the thermodynamics required of today's computing technology in order to break 256-bit security:
"We cannot even imagine a world where 256-bit brute force searches are possible. It requires some fundamental breakthroughs in physics and our understanding of the universe.
One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)
Given that k = 1.38 × 10−16 erg/K, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2 Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2 K would consume 4.4 × 10−16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21 × 1041 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7 × 1056 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 1051 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."Another unique property to hashing is that every unique input has a completely unique output. Currently, there are no known collisions for the SHA256 algorithm that bitcoin uses. This means that for all the infinite possible inputs, we have currently not found any two inputs that yield the same output. This is critical for the next security feature. For each new block that is added to the blockchain, the hash of the previous block is included and hashed into the new block. This is what creates the immutable blockchain. This means that if any prior block were to be altered, the entire proof of work that went into all blocks there afterward would need to be rehashed in order for the blockchain to stay valid.
Currently, the bitcoin network consists of the most computing power in any one single network in the world. There is more computing power on the bitcoin network that the total of the world's 600 top supercomputers combined. This is an immense amount of computing power that provides bitcoin its security and is completely unique to bitcoin's blockchain. I am not sure exactly the current number as it is constantly changing, but in order for the entire bitcoin blockchain to be reworked, the current bitcoin network would need to calculate for something like 200 days straight. This means that for any other entity that wanted to alter the transaction history of the bitcoin blockchain, not only would you need to have more computing power than the rest of the bitcoin network, but you'd need to put it to work for a very long time which would quickly become cost prohibitive (as if having that much computing power wouldn't be cost prohibitive for one single entity in the first place). The further any given block is buried in the blockchain, the more secure it becomes. Estimates are something around the vicinity of $60 billion dollars to attempt to "counterfeit" one single bitcoin which means economically it just makes sense to purchase bitcoin on the market as opposed to trying to cheat the system. That cost will only continue to rise as more computing power is added to the network.
3) Quantum computing protection: Now the idea of computers being made of something other than matter and occuying something other than space (as noted in the quote above) alludes to the idea of quantum computers. Quantum computers use qubits instead of bits consisting of 1's and 0's. Qubits can be a 1 or a 0 and essentially any superposition of those two states. Using specific algorithms (like Shor's algo), quantum computers can take an integer and finds its prime factors extremely quickly because of the fact that it can solve for many states at the same and solve the equation in polynomial time.
In otherwords, given a public key (which is based on two very large prime numbers), you can find the original prime used numbers which is essentially the private key. Bitcoin uses public and private keys for digital signatures for securing bitcoins for their owners. However, bitcoin uses clever techniques to protect against the threat of quantum computing. Whenever a transaction is signed to send money to another address, its public key is added to the signed transaction so that the network and recipient can verify that the signer was indeed the owner of the bitcoin's being sent. Because addresses are hashes of the public key, this means that the only time that the actual public key is exposed is when the bitcoin address is actually being emptied and sent to the recipient. This is why it is important to never use the same bitcoin address twice. By the time a quantum computer receives the public key in order to attempt to decipher the private key from it, the address will have already been emptied of bitcoin and be worthless. Since quantum computers are not efficient at solving hashing equations, this protects bitcoin from the threat of quantum computers. Should there be a need to change encryption algorithms or increase the key size, this can be done through an upgrade and due to the decentralized nature of the network, the threat of this type of issue in the future is a much bigger threat to existing traditional centralized institutions that depend on these same encryption algorithms for security and rely on single points of failure to protect massive amounts of confidential data.
This is just a small sample of some of the more major components of the security that bitcoin provides and I hope I explained it in a way that is easy to understand.
L.A.S., I gave you the rebuttal I did because it is clear from your posts that after information like this is provided for you, you still continue to post FUD information about bitcoin such as an article about a data breach that is not unique to bitcoin, but is commonplace among every industry out there. The fact that the bitcoin that were stolen cannot be recovered is no different from the billions of USD that are stolen every year before even the data breaches that were the root cause were even discovered. At least when bitcoin is stolen, it is apparent immediately that they are gone compared to the covert fraud that takes place from compromised payment information every single day before it becomes clear there was a breach somewhere.
You're free to post on any topic you'd like, but don't mistake what you're posting as advice to anyone when it is clear from your post history that you have a clear bias against this technology and a lack of understanding of it as well. I welcome any open dialog and debate and if you'd like to engage in that, I'd be more than happy to.