"ChainAnchor has been developed for permissioned / private blockchains, and not for the bitcoin blockchain."

and the website that only has a small blurb... and the latest draft of their paper on the topic? it seems somewhat absurd to forget to mention that, like as if they were trying to hide the paper or something

FWIW, that draft was added after I published my blog post.

Bitcoin is like a case study in how profit-seeking creates centralized systems:

Start with a system whose explicit goal is to create a decentralized, bottom-up P2P cash. End up with a system governed hamfistedly by a handful of developers and a few ASIC manufacturers and their obnoxious business partners.

Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China.

SMH

> Punch line: the best place to be a Bitcoin profiteer is in the libertarian bastion of the People's Republic of China.

Why is that a punch line? I don't see the contradiction.

I love this joke of a proposal. Especially the diagram with the centralized database node. It made me spit out my drink. Why not just run the whole blockchain through a centralized database if you're going to do it that way? Write a web-app with a database backend and some web services and call it a day.

I think people need to stop and think about the ChainAnchor project without jumping to stark conclusions about its intent.

ChainAnchor is an experiment born in MIT. The project is lead by Sandy Pentland and company, who have a strong record in pursuing rights online. Pentland's group releases papers, as all academics do, to foster peer review.

In the case of blockchains and cryptocurrency, practioners like Peter Todd (author of this blog post) could play an important role in that peer review process. However, in this circumstance Todd responded in a public, inflammatory way.

Consider for a moment what an entirely academic-led peer review process would be like if controversial papers such as that about ChainAnchor were publicly attacked and its authors humiliated. This would quickly become an unsafe environment to explore and challenge ideas.

If academia is to partner with practitioners / experts, both groups are going to need to achieve a mutually beneficial arrangement to advance the field together. This is now a case of what such an arrangement would not look like.

for the record-- I currently have no commercial nor academic interests in this subject

If you can bribe certain actors to corrupt a system, the system is not decentralized enough.

I guess this is the consequence of mining centralization (but I have faith that this problem will be solved).

> I have faith that this problem will be solved

By what mechanism do foresee this happening (ie. users change PoW, much greater diffusion of mining hardware, order-of-magnitude crash in price, etc?)

Good question.

I have a project in mind :)

Regardless of this being chainanchor's goal, do you think this approach would work?

Bribing Chinese miners to prevent themselves from using Bitcoin to circumvent capital controls? Sure, why not?