Can’t be hacked. World’s best encryption. If it was possible, banks, businesses, and nuclear weapons installations would ALL be vulernable to being hacked by the same method.
What if you break into Bitcoin’s office and steal the encryption?
…What? Bitcoin doesn’t have an office
But, ah-ha! So whoever knows the encryption can counterfeit.
Yeah, if they can break NSA AES, they can break anything.
The relevant part by Schiff on Bitcoin:
You don’t have to break the encryption. You could steal the key from whoever has it.
This is why TrueCrypt is ineffective against the someone shoulder surfing you while you enter your password.
Thanks Esuric,
Still though I am a little confused about this issue. But to clear this up: I was not claiming that Mises’s regression was unfalsifiable, I was claiming that the Bitcoin was consistent to Mises regression… I’ll do a bit more research about it and it would be a good topic to discuss when I travel to Auburn for Mises U.
I find it sad that even the Bitcoin advocates on this Austrian forum don’t understand how bitcoin actually works…
False. Bitcoin is not a computer program, it’s primarily an algorithim. It’s potentially possible that someone will find a flaw in a particular implimentation of that algorithim; but with the growing number of clients that exist, the odds of that resulting in any real damage to the bitcoin network or economy are small and decreasing.
False. Bitcoin does not use this kind of encryption. It’s entirely different than the kind most people have experience with, and there is no great key to ‘unlock’ it. Such a thing would be futile in bitcoin, as the blockchain (a massive, redundent triple entry ledger) must be machine readable by every node on the network. Transactions are not hidden from human or machine interpretation. Bitcoin uses secure hashing to digitally ‘sign’ transactions, so that the nodes on the network can mathmatically verify that the transaction could only have been produced by the person who possesses the private key to those coins, and thus can be assumed to have been the legitimate owner of those coins. No amount of brute force matters in this context, and there is no great secret key to lay open the whole of bitcoin. The only secret keys that exist, are individually produced by end users, and can only control the coins that are tied to that key, and only for as long as they remain unspent. So even a hacking only exposes the users that use that particular machine to hold their private keys. In the early days, this was a problem, but users are finally beginning to be more savvy about how they store those keys.
You might think so, but 256-bit encryption is no joke. You can only get away with this statement because the computer industry is young. Eventually there will be standards that are simply secure. Factoring primes is not easy by any means. Quantum computers may change that; we shall see.
The topic of quantum computing has already been reviewed in depth, and even they don’t pose a long term threat to Bitcoin’s security model. The reason is that Bitcoin uses encryption algos developed openly by others, and is modular. The current protocol expects two successive hashing algos to be used in series, and even in the reference code these are modular code blocks. Currently, only SHA-256 is used twice, and SHA algos may be at risk under quantum computing forms of attack; however quantum resistant hashing algos are currently under development. The expectation is that, once one or more of these quantum resistant hashing algos are mature, the community will decide which one to swap out for one of the two itenerations of SHA-256. It’s also possible that quantum computing never materializes in a mature format, and in the future SHA-256 would be at risk only due to Moore’s Law. In which case swapping out one (or both) itenerations of SHA-256 for SHA-512 (under development) or SHA-1024 (not yet under development) would be better. In any case, Satoshi Nakamoto foresaw the need to change the encryption algos in use by bitcoin, and included an upgrade method that requires consensus (or near consensus) of users to affect such changes.