> All alarm bells should go off when you hear "security without trust".
I agree and disagree. Your position assumes that national governments and banks are fully trustable. We just had a thread here yesterday about how it seems rather fishy that it takes banks several days to carry out a distributed transaction that increments/decrements two long integers across the Internet. Add in the various shenanigans US Congress and the Federal Reserve do with the federal budget and money supply, and the likely reality of wide-scale manipulation conspiracies by Wall Street. This and other issues does not add up to a picture of a perfectly trustable system. And it's the baseline against which you have to evaluate Bitcoin.
That said, your hypothetical attack scenarios are legitimate things to consider. I'm not qualified to speak about whether they are feasible or if counter-measures have already been designed into the system yet, or whether these are fatal flaws. I do think it's useful to consider new ways of dealing with financial transactions if there are opportunities to leverage new technology that lets us keep the baby while getting rid of the bathwater.
I agree and disagree. Your position assumes that national governments and banks are fully trustable. We just had a thread here yesterday about how it seems rather fishy that it takes banks several days to carry out a distributed transaction that increments/decrements two long integers across the Internet. Add in the various shenanigans US Congress and the Federal Reserve do with the federal budget and money supply, and the likely reality of wide-scale manipulation conspiracies by Wall Street. This and other issues does not add up to a picture of a perfectly trustable system. And it's the baseline against which you have to evaluate Bitcoin.
That said, your hypothetical attack scenarios are legitimate things to consider. I'm not qualified to speak about whether they are feasible or if counter-measures have already been designed into the system yet, or whether these are fatal flaws. I do think it's useful to consider new ways of dealing with financial transactions if there are opportunities to leverage new technology that lets us keep the baby while getting rid of the bathwater.