This is pure innuendo.<p>The Bitcoin paper at least presented a thorough argument. Andresen, who did not seem (in his Bitcoin Reddit post) to have grasped that argument, is obviously unhappy that "Bitcoin" didn't get a preprint or approve its presentation to the press. But the authors of the paper signed their name to it; the lead author is a lecturer at a serious university.<p>Instead of rebutting any technical point the paper makes, Andresen casts aspersions, alludes to a "peer review" process that would not have prevented the paper's publication, and then suggests the paper is flawed technically. Well, how?<p>Here, instead, is a vastly superior critical response by Ed Felten:<p><a href="https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/" rel="nofollow">https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-br...</a>
<i>"...it is unfortunate (but entirely predictable) that the release of a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper generated so many sensationalistic headlines. Peer review works best when everybody involved is given time for conversation and debate without being contacted by reporters on deadline."</i><p>Translation: next time, please send us the paper in advance and get it peer reviewed before you start talking to reporters.<p><i>"I’m not going to write about the specific claims in the paper... However, it is good to note that in my initial review, I believe the paper’s assertion of a fundamental flaw is based on some over-simplified assumptions about how the bitcoin mining market works."</i><p>Translation: the paper's claims are probably wrong.
Gavin Andresen writes:
> Peer review works best when everybody involved is given time for conversation and debate without being contacted by reporters on deadline.<p>In other words, the entire institution of science (computer science in this case) is better off if the individual researchers are careful about presenting things to the press and make sure to review things carefully before publishing.<p>But the incentive for individual researchers may not be aligned with this. An individual researcher might be able to advance their career by going to the press (particularly about a hot-in-the-news-right-now topic like Bitcoin) and by making sensational claims ("Bitcoin is 'Broken'!") even if the overall scientific enterprise suffers. After all, had you ever heard of Ittay Eyal or Emin Sirer before this? Given these skewed incentives, at least a few people will "cheat" the system by going to the press, and those people will profit by it.<p>Rather like Eyal and Sirer's claim for Bitcoin miners.<p>- - - - - - - - - -<p>To discuss the merits of the paper itself (rather than Gavin's response), if a mining pool were to utilize the strategy described in the paper it would result in that pool repeatedly releasing new chains that are longer than the existing blockchain but which fork one OR MORE of the previously released chains. While this is allowed under the Bitcoin protocol (this is the way that forks in the chain get "healed"), it is also rather obviously visible. So if certain miners were following this protocol then it would quickly become obvious that they were doing so. The community would then be able to take actions to redress the problem.
The way bitcoin is broken is that there are people with VAST wallets that could be state actors. If the CIA truly did invent bitcoin then they have immense power on it and it's stability. The hard part about this risk is that there is no way to mitigate it.