Re: [CFRG] Bitcoin delenda est. Was: Escalation: time commitment to fix *production* security bugs for BLS RFC v4?

I'm conflicted on the topic of cryptocurrency intersecting with
cryptography because of bad faith on one side (as this thread demonstrates)
and the risk of excessive gatekeeping on the other. (I have a blog post on
the topic [1] if anyone is interested.)

However, that's about cryptography in general.

In my opinion, it would be a very big mistake for the IETF to tacitly or
directly endorse any cryptocurrency project in 2021. (We can revisit this
when the technologies have had a chance to mature, become greener, and
on-chain privacy becomes ubiquitous.)

If there are security concerns about the BLS draft, that's worth fixing
irrespective of whether it impacts cryptocurrency or not. Fixing a security
concern that is only know to impact cryptocurrency is not sufficient to be
tacit endorsement or direct support, as there may be other unknown impacted
use cases. That's just good security engineering, and well within the
mission of CFRG.

Thus, I propose we end this thread before more irrelevant material gets
submitted. We can do the good thing without doing bad things.

[1]: https://soatok.blog/2021/04/19/a-furrys-guide-to-cryptocurrency/

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:24 PM Mike Hamburg <mike@shiftleft.org> wrote:

> Also, sorry for the double post, but according to
> https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption, Bitcoin energy
> consumption is up 37% year-on-year, and Ethereum is up by a factor of 5
> (!!!) year-on-year.  Something that's ~1% of human electricity consumption,
> and rising significantly year-on-year, is absolutely something to be
> concerned about.
>
> There are claims that this will somehow help us soak up surplus solar
> energy during the day, and be idle by night, but this is like
> Ethereum-proof-of-stake from my POV: until it actually happens at scale, I
> won’t trust it.
>
> Apologies again,
> — Mike
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