Whether prices are up or down, for many investors in cryptocurrency, the real appeal is that there’s nobody in charge. But a new report finds that the decentralized system might not be working as well as many crypto enthusiasts assume.or a one-time activity like creating a cluster, but not for continuous tasks like app delivery and configuration management.
The report was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the work was done by the software security research company Trail of Bits.
“It’s been taken for granted that the blockchain is immutable and decentralized, because the community says so,” says Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido.
But in practice, he says, these networks have evolved in ways that concentrate power in the hands of certain people or companies, including the large pools of “miners” whose computers earn virtual currency by maintaining the blockchains. Guido’s team calls these potential situations “unintended centralities” — situations in which someone gains leverage over the decentralized system, creating opportunities for tampering with the record of who owns what.
Another example in the report of this kind of concentration is the fact that 60% of Bitcoin traffic is handled by just three internet service providers.
“Let’s say somebody with great top-down control of the internet in their country starts to interfere with that network,” Guido says. By slowing down or stopping legitimate blockchain traffic, an attacker could become the “majority” voice in the consensus of what’s written to a blockchain at that moment. “They can rewrite history. They can censor transactions. They can make it so that you can’t spend your Bitcoin,” says Guido. “It’s definitely something people would want to do if they want to ‘grief’ the network.” To learn more follow the link to original article. Excellent read!
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