@jimmysong
Bitcoin Developer, Educator and Entrepreneur
Nothing here yet.
Nothing here yet.
No blogs yet.
Their history? They started with an ICO which is very much a centralized entity. That gives them some authority over the entire project since they can claim they're serving all the people that gave them money at the beginning (but not as a security, apparently).
The only way to redistribute is to either: A. make the people that don't have money to create goods and services others want B. confiscate money from richer people and redistribute. The first is the market and generally, this results in a Paretto distribution. The second is socialism. Literally, claim what rich people possess as "societal" good and redistribute to others. There isn't some in between. You either have some central entity that redistributes wealth or you don't. So yes, a "more fair" distribution according to your standard is socialism.
If your hope is to see perfectly distributed money, then only socialism is going to satisfy you and that way lies madness. The point of these protocols is to take away the ability of the government to confiscate your money through inflation. You should only get into Bitcoin if you want control of your money back. It's fundamentally incompatible with something like socialism.
I don't believe Bitmain controls 51% of all double-sha256 hash power, so I don't agree with him in changing tho algorithm. I also don't think a single government can shut down bitcoin. I believe maybe some large consortium of governments possibly could, but not a single one.
I don't see this as a threat, largely because I think quantum computing is much further away from realistic implementation than the media hypes it up to be. The best known attack on elliptic curve discrete log is Shor's algorithm which still requires 2^128 operations on a quantum computer. Doing even a tiny fraction of that is beyond our engineering capability at the moment, so I don't see this as a threat. If there is a threat to Discrete Log, it's going to be something out of left field that no one expected and not something people have been hyping for decades like quantum computing.