This is the real bji, right?
Yes, it's me, I have no idea what the forum software did because someone else's entire post is attributed to me! You can tell that I didn't write it because it's pointing out flaws in some of my own logic and not written from my perspective on the matter. Weird.
I certainly did intend to directly and personally tease you with Moynihan's quote because I hope we've all been arguing not between differences of opinion but assertions of fact.
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. But, Senator, you are not entitled to your own facts"
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003 or James R. Schlesinger, 1973
I then continued to quote your post, commenting throughout. I agreed with you that this thread has had multiple sub-threads and I tried to address those diversions as I saw them. My veiled insult ("Honest nodes will acknowledge defeat, malicious nodes will not, much like this thread") was a side note directed at the general inconclusive sub-threads and the posters who propagated them, not to you specifically. I hope you will accept my apology. I sincerely did not mean to single you out, but I can see that by quoting you exclusively, that is what I've done. I am sorry.
More than any other post, I appreciated your attempt to put your argument in numbers. Despite Kjj pointing out the limited domain, I hoped to see revised attempts to quantifying the difficulty of a double-spend attack, both within a few blocks and over a sustained attack.
Well, I admit to being a little more affronted by your post than was really called for; so I apologize for my own haste to judgement about your intentions. And anyway I appreciate your conciliatory words here.
I think that some good points were made in this discussion about the resilience of the bitcoin protocol to attacks by anyone with less than 50% hashing power. I think I was wrong in claiming that the effects of a "lucky" lower-power hasher with bad intentions could be disruptive; the honest majority will always win and should win quickly enough that anyone waiting for a reasonable number of confirmations can have high confidence in confirmed transactions.
I do believe that we've fairly well shown why reducing the block generation time to every 2 minutes would be a bad idea (because it would make all of the points about why bitcoin is resilient against these kinds of attacks less strong and make such attacks much more likely to succeed, in addition to generally creating lots more block chain forking and general uncertainty).
