Bitcoin Forum

From <50% to down... what are you doing here???  :D

this is actually one of the very few good polls.

Never say never.

Define bitcoin? The bitcoin we know today will surely be "hacked" 1,000+ years into the future as computers get more powerful.

people voting 100%

you read all the source code and thought about it for months, or you blindly believe it 100%?

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "bitcoin itself".

"bitcoin" is just a protocol.  There are many implementations of that protocol. Any one of those implementations might become "hacked" (Bitcoin-Qt, Electrum, blockchain.info, etc).

Edit: I think my comments about "hacking a protocol" were not well thought out or well expressed.  To avoid confusion, I've removed them from this post.

bitcoin could be hacked and we dont even know it, someone finds a way to create bitcoins without making the GPU do any work, and can create infinite bit coins

their must be a simple way to check if this is the case, add up all the wallets with coins on the block chain and you should get 10.576 million coin

Someone do this please!

No bitcoins can come out of nowhere. That's not how it works. No bitcoin client would accept "coins" that came from nowhere.

prove it.

I can't fool everyone and make them believe i did the work
or somehow side step the hole minning issue and just send made up coins.

I know what THEY say, but can you prove it, without asking me to "understand" the hole system. add up the all the coins and say see 10million so far.

So you want me to try and create a transaction that says I'm paying 50 bitcoins from an address that doesn't have any to another address and broadcast it to the network and see what happens?

no i want you to HACK it! and prove to everyone it dosnt work...

or figure out a way to show some kind of proof that their isnt more then 10 million coins out there

very interesting.

http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins

I've already done this.

(and the word is "there" not "their")  ;)

Pretty much my thoughts.  Can the current version be "hacked"? Depending on your definition of hacking, then maybe. I dunno. Probably?

But the ability to fork the chain makes it pretty much impossible to permanently hack as long as development is active.

finally someone said it!

ok 12.59 here we come!  :D

I believe bitcoin will survive any and all hacks, and so far so good.

lol.  is it possible to troll one's self?  ;)

Your desperation is getting really depressing. :(  Just buy back your coins and we can all move on. Move on, together. As a family.

I had vote 99.9% if it was possible, and cant vote 100%..So 90% was my vote..

i voted 90 for the same reason

Given the pretence of "never" I think it is more likely that bitcoin is hacked sometimes down the road than not.
I don't think it would involve breaking the protocol but if it does circumventing it.

I agree

but i read this and it seems promising

its like "even if its hacked, worst case scenario we'll just fork the blockchain or something"  :D

I read rather carefully about the EC algorithm Bitcoin uses and this is the very core of Bitcoin. Everything else follows and is patchable.

EC is like an equation with more than one unknown, there is mathematically speaking no way to solve it except brute force.


(I assumed your poll meant catastrophically hacked not some minor and temporary exploit or rare double spend.)

EC is used for signing transactions, not for mining.  It is the SHA256 hashing algorithm that brute force collision finding is used on.

probably being very logical and thinking about pretty long timeframes.

One can easily argue bitcoin will get hacked at some point, assuming time never ends (everything happens then).

I thought that line of thought was irrelevant because cleary, time ended yesterday. So I voted 100%. If sha256 gets short-cut, bitcoin will switch to something new. Same for ECDSA.

I am rather confident about SHA256 as well and it is a little less critical due to the difficulty adjustments.

If it starts to break down slowly like MD5 has in 50-100 years or so I am sure most bitcoiners would agree unanimously to a protocol upgrade.

It will definitely be hacked eventually. As long as it doesn't happen too often, and there are contingency plans in place, it doesn't worry me too much. Too many hacks and bitcoin would go the way of sony corporation.

I think a broken SHA256 is not as bad as a broken ECDSA. If only SHA256 is broken, the worst that can happen is double spending and super fast mining. But this will make it to the news soon enough and effectively limit the damage, because no one wants to accept payments anymore. So in this case, I think the whole system would slow down and come to a halt until the switch to another hash-algorithm has been made.
A broken ECDSA however would more or less immediately invalidate the value of your coins, because the state of who owns how many coins can no longer be reconstructed. Actually, in this scenario everyone could claim all the coins. So IMO a transition to a new system or asymmetric encryption algorithm would not be possible.

Then of course additionally there is the risk of the protocol itself failing somehow. But as there has been and still is a real good incentive to find flaws in the protocol and the fact that there have none been found for the last three years makes me believe that this risk is becoming smaller and smaller every day.