More Scalable Security: Notaries + DHT

Filipe,

I know the article is long, but I was trying to be thorough, so you probably didn’t make it to the Hawala use case which doesn’t have this concern for other reasons (You’d be leaving countersigned evidence in other chains in small network of known actors and get blacklisted and put out of business quickly.). I want to make it clear that different types of cryptocurrencies are sensible for different settings/applications/needs. Not everyone needs “bulletproof.”

And then there’s the whole section of the article (“More Scalable Security: Notaries + DHT”) which specifically addresses this type of vulnerability with an easily implementable DHT solution and entities that “notarize” transactions to the DHT whose signatures you also need to complete the commit to your own chain. This leaves a publicly accessible trail which can be queried by your public key to make it very clear if you’re trying that kind of monkey business with your chain.

We can continue to add additional layers of assurances, but since the article was titled “Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies” I stopped there and plan to add more posts addressing all the standard vulnerabilities and concerns.

If this field is of interest, I recommend reading those later sections of the article.