RE: Dash vs Bitcoin
While I was working in market analytics at a firm, we used VMware for corporate simulations and market analytics, behind a secure linux distro. And this was just standard corporate protocol for simulations.
VMware is a pretty buggy simulator, they are constantly finding new bugs in it, even though it's like 10+ years old.
Then you have Xen which is basically an even lower level virtualizer, behind many Linux management and testing systems.
They are trying to work as hard as possible to eliminate bugs, but they always find new ones.
Most of the time because of the non-cooperation from hardware developers (the irony).
And then we have ETH which is basically built on all these stacks. One stack over the other, full of bugs, and you are going to tell me that a system that runs on multiple OS'es worldwide won't have a critical bug at some point that could crash the entire network?
I think that is very very likely. And if you attach a 1 billion $ bounty, you will have hackers crawling out from under every rock to make this happen.
:) I'm quite familiar with virtualization. My understanding of the Ethereum implementation and requisite cryptography give me a sense of security. Well, there is a 6 billion bounty right now so let us wait and see.
Indeed it's 6 billion, I was used to 1 billion though, I was invested in other markets though.
My fear is from all these privilege escalations that you find on linux systems. On Windows, I don't even have words for that, but on Linux it's pretty frustrating as well.
You can basically introduce some memory loophole or low level bug, that will take over a full node for example, and if a coordinated attack like that happens on multiple nodes, that could be a real issue.
We already know that most hardwares are insecure, and given the complexity of ETH, this only increases the probability of such hacks occuring.
Either we invent some dedicated ASIC for full nodes just as for mining, and similarly for private key holding, because we can't really trust established PC manufacturers (Intel, AMD, you name it). Or this will only get worse.