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A funny thing happened in the second half of 2018. At one point, all the actors in the crypto sector looked around and realized that we were not very numerous. The friends we had convinced during the last holiday season did not talk to us anymore. They had stopped checking their Coinbase accounts. The tide was out of the beach. Tokens and blockchains were supposed to change the world; how is it that no one uses them?
In most cases, always, nobody is use them. In this respect, many cryptography projects have had tremendous success. The call of cryptocurrency is understood by many as the absence of human fallibility. There is no central banker who plays politics with the money supply. There is no lawyer supervising the contract. Sometimes one has the impression that cryptographic developers have adopted the defense mechanism of skunk. It works: they manage to keep people away.
Some now recognize the need for human users, the "social layer" of Bitcoin and other encrypted networks. This human component is still considered as its weakest link. I write to propose that the human component of crypto is its most powerful link. For encryption network builders, the question of how to attract the right users is a question that should be asked before knowing how to defend against attackers (aka bad users). Contrary to what one might hear on Twitter, when evaluating an encrypted network, the demographics and ideologies of its users matter. They are the ultimate line of defense and the ultimate decision maker in direction and storytelling.
What was Ethereum was right
Since the collapse of The DAO, no one in the crypto should be allowed to say that "the code is the law" with a straight face. The DAO was a decentralized venture capital fund that boldly claimed pure governance by code, then imploded when someone discovered a loophole. Ethereum, an encryption protocol on which the DAO was built, erased this fiasco with a hard range, bringing the transaction log back to the time before the disaster. The dissidents of this intervention within the social stratum continued to follow the original untreated Ethereum protocol, calling it Ethereum Clbadic. For the so-called "maximalist Bitcoin", the DAO fork is emblematic of the dependence on the confidence of Ethereum, and therefore of its weakness.
There is therefore an irony in the current enthusiasm of the maximalists for stories describing the resilience of Bitcoin's social stratum. The story is as follows: in case of security failure, the community of developers, investors, miners and users of Bitcoin is an ultimate layer of defense. We, the Bitcoin community, have the opportunity to modify the protocol – to transfer our investment in time, capital and computing power to a new version of Bitcoin. It is our collective commitment to a monetary system that minimizes trust and strengthens Bitcoin. (Disclosure: I hold Bitcoin and Ether.)
Even this story implies trust – towards the people who make up this crowd. Historically, Bitcoin Core developers, who run Bitcoin's dominant client software, have also been influential in shaping the Bitcoin roadmap and the history of its use cases. The minimal confidence of Ethereum is different, it is a group of direction open to the public whose speech is largely absorbed. In both models, the social layer remains. When they jostled the DAO, the Ethereum leaders had to convince a community to join.
You can not believe in the wisdom of the crowd and neglect the ability to see through an illegitimate power grab, orchestrated from the outside. When people criticize Ethereum or Bitcoin, they really criticize this crowd, accusing it of propensity to fear false stories.
How do you protect the Bitcoin core code?
In September, Bitcoin Core developers fixed and disclosed a vulnerability that would have allowed an attacker to crash the Bitcoin network. This vulnerability was created in March 2017 with Bitcoin Core 0.14. He stayed there for 18 months until his discovery.
There is no doubt that Bitcoin Core attracts some of the brightest and brightest developers in the world, but they are fallible and, importantly, some of them are pseudonymous. Could a state actor, working under a pseudonym, produce a code good enough to be accepted in the Bitcoin protocol? Could it slip into another, undetected vulnerability for later exploitation? The answer is definitely yes, it's possible, and it would be naive to believe the opposite. (I doubt that the developers of Bitcoin Core themselves are so naive.)
Why has no government yet tried to remove Bitcoin by exploiting such weakness? Could it be that governments and other powerful potential attackers are, if not friendly, at least tolerant of the continued growth of Bitcoin? The bitcoin crypto culture that persists against hostility is very narrative. Is this story even real?
The social layer is the key to the success of crypto
Some argue that badism and racism do not count for Bitcoin. They do. Bitcoin regulars should think about the books we recommend and the words we write and speak. If your social layer is full of badholes, your network is vulnerable. All hacks are not technical. Companies can also be hacked with bad or unsafe ideas. (There are more and more examples of this, apart from crypto.)
Not all white papers are as elegant as Satoshi Nakamoto's white Bitcoin paper. Many of them are more than 50 pages long, devoting lengthy sections to the imagination of various potential attacks and to the way the network's "crypto-economic" system internally incites them and imposes penalties that make them unusable. They remind me of the vast digital fortresses that my eight-year-old son built at Minecraft, bristling with hatches and turrets.
I love my son (and his Minecraft creations), but the question that he and the developers of crypto may have forgotten to ask is this: why would anyone want to enter this fortress so threatening, not to mention to attack him? Who will enter, talent carrier, ETH or gold? Focus on the user, this is not a shave of yak, when the user is the ultimate security defense. I'm not saying that security should be an afterthought, but perhaps a network should be put in place to get people in, rather than exclude them.
The author thanks Tadge Dryja and Emin Gün Sirer, who made comments that helped refine some of the ideas presented in this article.
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