Microsoft 2012 was so right abt Bitcoin, still SHORT btc, the mind of a pedophile Billy and his peopple says it all. research paper Feb 2012:

On Bitcoin and Red Balloons

Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.

moshe@microsoft.com

Shahar Dobzinski, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University.

shahar@cs.cornell.edu

Sigal Oren, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University.

sigal@cs.cornell.edu

Aviv Zohar, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.

avivz@microsoft.com

Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. However,

it is common that only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and

thus informed participants have an incentive not to propagate information to others. One recent scenario in

which such tension arises is the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge (finding red balloons). We focus on another

prominent scenario: Bitcoin, a decentralized electronic currency system.

Bitcoin represents a radical new approach to monetary systems. It has been getting a large amount

of public attention over the last year, both in policy discussions and in the popular press [Davis 2011;

Surowiecki 2011]. Its cryptographic fundamentals have largely held up even as its usage has become in-

creasingly widespread. We find, however, that it exhibits a fundamental problem of a different nature,

based on how its incentives are structured. We propose a modification to the protocol that can eliminate

this problem.