Security consultant who discussed Bitcoin's early security implications
On January 24, 2009, San Francisco Bay Area security consultant Bill Frantz replied to Hal Finney with a characteristically ironic observation about how Bitcoin’s mining incentives might reshape network-security economics — engaging the same botnet-mining concern Jonathan Thornburg had raised a week earlier, from the opposite angle:
The 0wned machines are among the most secure on the network because botnet operators work hard to keep others from compromising ‘their’ machines.
He speculated that botnet operators might evolve into legitimate security firms — protecting computers against compromise in exchange for proof-of-work mining rewards.
Frantz consults under the firm name Periwinkle (pwpconsult.com).
Frantz’s reply directly answered Hal Finney’s argument that proof-of-work tokens create security incentives — the botnet observation quoted above was his ironic response to it. The next day, Satoshi’s own reply to Dustin Trammell picked up the same botnet/proof-of-work economics from the opposite angle, proposing “reverse-spamming” as a market countermeasure rather than Frantz’s ironic security upside.
It was a throwaway, half-ironic line — but it caught something real: the same proof-of-work reward that secures the chain could, in principle, pay the people who run botnets to defend machines rather than exploit them.
4 entries / 2 threads
Bill Frantz replies that Levine may be right about proof-of-work coins, which grow on trees for a botnet, but not entirely about money tied to the international monetary system.
Bill Frantz passes on that 0wned machines are said to be among the most secure on the network, since botnet operators keep others out, and pictures them becoming security firms paid in PoW money.