Rhett Creighton, a prominent member of the crypto community who previously made contributions to the Bitcoin Core codebase, has argued that “nothing compares with the proof-of-work (PoW) security of Bitcoin (BTC).”
Creighton, a nuclear engineering postgraduate from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told CryptoGlobe that the “worst and least secure PoW networks are the ones with low hashrate and an algorithm that is used on a network with higher hashrate.”
Easier To Launch 51% Attacks On Small Coins
Creighton, who has experience working as a blockchain developer on several altcoin projects such as bitcoin private (BTCP) and zclassic (ZCL), explained: “We saw this, for example where Ethereum Classic was recently 51% attacked because it’s easy to take existing ETH miners and temporarily point them at ETC, just long enough to pull off the attack.”
When questioned about whether he thinks proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus is possible as a secure and legitimate blockchain consensus protocol, Rhett remarked:
There are many consensus protocols. The CAP Theorem or FLP Impossibility Proof is well known in distributed networking theory. PoW is one consensus mechanism that has a property known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance. There are other PoW protocols which may have BFT, but are limiting in other ways, for example, Peercoin is a PoS coin which has existed since 2013, and it suffers from the well known “Nothing At Stake” problem. Casper and other modern protocols hope to provide solutions to this, but they are yet to be proven.
The CAP theorem has been derived from “a concept that a distributed database system can only have 2 of the 3: Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance.” CAP theorem has important use cases and implications when managing large sets of data on decentralized networks.
Meanwhile, the FLP Impossibility Proof is notably one of the “most important results in distributed systems theory [which] was published in April 1985 by Fischer, Lynch and Patterson.” In a paper titled “Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process”, the researchers were able to prove that there exists a definitive upper bound on what “is possible to achieve with distributed processes in an asynchronous environment.”
Forking Gives Us “Freedom To Choose What We Want”
Responding to a question about whether he thinks hard forks and soft forks, particularly contentious ones, like those that occurred with Bitcoin (BTC) to create Bitcoin Cash and then on BCH to create Bitcoin SV are harmful to crypto, Creighton said:
Forking is always an option in open source software. It needs to be there because it's the only way we all have the freedom to choose and leave a network if we don't agree with the values any longer. Of course, when a network forks and splits, it can have disastrous effects to the community. Both new fork chains might die, or one of the two might die.
He continued: ”Many Ethereum evangelists feel like the Ethereum Classic fork from Ethereum was positive for their community because all the people who disagreed with the majority value belief system were able to leave and no longer interfere with the core values of the Ethereum community.”
When asked about the cybersecurity risks such as phishing, hacks of online exchanges, lack of reliable/affordable custodial solutions, and other current pressing challenges faced by crypto today, and whether he thinks these are going to be there in 10 years from now, Creighton noted:
My target is that in 20 years, the GDP of the planet will be 10x what it is today measured in ounces of gold or some long-term store of real value (obviously not measuring in fiat dollars, which will go to zero). The economy will be 90% machine driven. Humans won’t be required to have jobs if they don’t want them.
“Humans Won’t Need Jobs” And “Won’t Need Private Keys”
He added: “Given that humans won’t need jobs, most of them won’t own any crypto or private keys, so they won’t have to worry about it. That will be a task mostly for machines and large decentralized organizations.”
In response to a question about what he believes are some possible use cases for blockchain, both private and public, that he sees being adopted in the future, Creighton said:
Git uses a Merkle-DAG (directed acyclic graph) data structure similar to what Bitcoin uses. It has been tracking the Linux Kernel source code and keeping it secure since 2005, because Linus Torvalds understood the need of using a “blockchain” or at that time a Merkle-DAG to secure the immutability of his source code that is responsible for probably trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure. When people ask me what private blockchain controls the most value, I usually think Git is the answer.”
