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When you engineer a system for deployment you build it to meet certain real-world goals. You may find that there are tradeoffs, and that you can’t achieve all of your goals, but that’s normal; as I’ve remarked, “engineering is the art of picking the right trade-off in an overconstrained environment”. For any computer-based financial system, one crucial parameter is the transaction rate. For a system like Bitcoin, another goal had to be avoiding concentrations of power. And of course, there’s transaction privacy. There are less obvious factors, too. These days, “mining” for Bitcoins requires a lot of computations, which translates directly into electrical power consumption. One estimate is that the Bitcoin network uses up more electricity than many countries. There’s also the question of governance: who makes decisions about how the network should operate? It’s not a question that naturally occurs to most scientists and engineers, but production systems need some path for change. In all of these, Bitcoin has failed. The failures weren’t inevitable; there are solutions to these problems in the acdemic literature. But Bitcoin was deployed by enthusiasts who in essence let experimental code escape from a lab to the world, without thinking about the engineering issues—and now they’re stuck with it. Perhaps another, better cryptocurrency can displace it, but it’s always much harder to displace something that exists than to fill a vacuum.
(tags: steven-bellovin bitcoin tech software systems engineering deployment cryptocurrency cypherpunks)