[poll] - how confident are you?

[DoomDumas]

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

[adamstgBit]

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

i voted 90 for the same reason

[ElectricMucus]

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.

[adamstgBit]

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

There was a dramatic hack in 2010 when an attacker was able to spend 92 billion bitcoins. He got the transaction into the block chain by exploiting an overflow bug in the standard client.

You can read how it unfolded here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0

Within three hours, Satoshi posted a patch to fix the exploit. But things didn't get back to normal until enough people were generating with the new version that the exploited block chain was overtaken by the forked good block chain.

It took about 20 hours for the good chain to overtake the bad chain. At this time, the generation difficulty was 511!

very interesting.

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

[Realpra]

people voting 100%

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

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.)

[notme]

people voting 100%

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

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.

[molecular]

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

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.

[Realpra]

people voting 100%

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

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.

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.

[Endgame]

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.

[flipperfish]

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.