Bible Pay

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  • Rob Andrews
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I need tBBP for address:  yQooaKF2sH3MqeqfFamycsMTaGtSkwc464
Enough to create a santuary and pay 1 BBP for the association

EDIT: Thanks got 1,000,000 tBBP Balance now

Looks like my Windows testnet sent all my tBBP

Is there a testnet block explorer? Found it:
https://testnet.biblepay-explorer.org

Looks like Alex is still on 1086.

Im on block 2721?  Hash:068ac664afb4c3cf21137c50fe0e4496305d29a21fb682d1a164c49b08e9212d





  • togoshigekata
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 ./biblepay-cli exec associate [email protected] XXXXXXXXX
{
  "Command": "associate",
  "E-Mail": "[email protected]",
  "Results": "Successfully advertised DC-Key.  Type exec getboincinfo to find more researcher information.  Welcome Aboard!  Thank you for donating your clock-cycles to help cure cancer!"
}

Im also on block 2721
./biblepay-cli getblockhash 2721
068ac664afb4c3cf21137c50fe0e4496305d29a21fb682d1a164c49b08e9212d

999998.99983900 BBP left after running the associate command (had 1,000,000), so it used 1.00016100 BBP

===

So what ended up happening with that, I linked my Rosetta Account / CPID with that BiblePay Wallet?,
Is it just a certain address from the wallet? (the one that paid the burn fee?)
all current addresses of the wallet? future addresses generated by the wallet?

Will the address in this wallet be the one that receives funds from the daily superblock (assuming I did enough CPU research that day to get paid)?

What happens if I want to change the wallet that should receive the funds? Will I have to do the burn thing again but from the new/other wallet?

====

It looks like the BOINC tasks are these like 5 - 5 1/2 hour tasks that you have 8 days to complete,
Do you only get credit once  you complete a task? (My work done still says 0, but my tasks are each only 26-28% complete)

====

How many tBBP do I need for a test sanctuary? I think I remember reading 500,000?
http://wiki.biblepay.org/Create_Masternode#BiblePay_Sanctuaries_Setup_-_Linux_Server

Ok looks like 500,000 is correct:
https://github.com/biblepay/biblepay/blob/3c41da883d57d313febeed8129dae25d56195891/src/init.cpp#L1101
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 11:05:58 PM by togoshigekata »


  • Rob Andrews
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./biblepay-cli exec associate [email protected] XXXXXXXXX
{
  "Command": "associate",
  "E-Mail": "[email protected]",
  "Results": "Successfully advertised DC-Key.  Type exec getboincinfo to find more researcher information.  Welcome Aboard!  Thank you for donating your clock-cycles to help cure cancer!"
}

Im also on block 2721
./biblepay-cli getblockhash 2721
068ac664afb4c3cf21137c50fe0e4496305d29a21fb682d1a164c49b08e9212d

999998.99983900 BBP left after running the associate command (had 1,000,000), so it used 1.00016100 BBP


->  The rest is the TxFee the Miner gets to mine your Burn Tx

===

So what ended up happening with that, I linked my Rosetta Account / CPID with that BiblePay Wallet?,
Is it just a certain address from the wallet? (the one that paid the burn fee?)
all current addresses of the wallet? future addresses generated by the wallet?

->  You linked the biblepay wallet address (to receive rewards for dc computing) to rosetta.  Yes, one address, but not the one that paid the fee.
Please type exec getboincinfo to see which one the wallet chose.




Will the address in this wallet be the one that receives funds from the daily superblock (assuming I did enough CPU research that day to get paid)?

-> Yes, daily.  Since testnet has 1 min blocks, you should receive rewards a few times a day.  See exec getboincinfo for the superblock schedule.


What happens if I want to change the wallet that should receive the funds? Will I have to do the burn thing again but from the new/other wallet?
->  I am working on a LIFO system now, this will let you move your Rosetta CPID to another wallet.  In the mean time, the only way to move it is to copy wallet.dat to the new controller machine.  LOL.  That will be done before March though.

====

It looks like the BOINC tasks are these like 5 - 5 1/2 hour tasks that you have 8 days to complete,
Do you only get credit once  you complete a task? (My work done still says 0, but my tasks are each only 26-28% complete)

->  You only get credit once task is completed.  Your RAC will start rising hourly.  Im up to something like 200 rac.  Btw there are ways to choose smaller workunits on rosetta, but lets talk about that tomorrow as we should look at all their work types first.


  • togoshigekata
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Thanks Rob, youre awesome!  8)
Look forward to testing more!

./biblepay-cli exec getboincinfo
{
  "Command": "getboincinfo",
  "CPID": "93138f032bdd027fa3246b48bb715a77",
  "Address": "yjUmY8EmuSKf6EWJf4aajWovksV2TQbxWc",
  "CPIDS": "93138f032bdd027fa3246b48bb715a77;",
  "Magnitude": 0,
  "LastSuperblockHeight": 2673,
  "NextSuperblockHeight": 2772
}
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 11:14:10 PM by togoshigekata »


  • Rob Andrews
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Thanks Rob, youre awesome!  8)
Look forward to testing more!

Thanks, you too.


  • znffal
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Ahhh, I installed the new BBP wallet, went to testnet and all of my old tBBP were gone.
Could someone please send me a few so I can do a burn transaction?

Thanks :)

yMC3QWwddFKgQGbMdJnZ9zZRCStj87Apvh


  • Rob Andrews
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Hi Rob,

I'm back from the previous time, since I saw the announcement for PoDC I stopped calculating the numbers for PoL, I've read the new proposol for PoDC and have some concerns.

First of all, I think it's a great idea to want to help scientific research, however I don't think the current proposel meets the criterea to remain a fair crypto currency. Relying on a single entity like BOINC to maintain a database of shares for mining even when verfied by a consensus system like masternodes would centralise the crypto currency and would allow hackers to unfairly edit the blockchain.

Not only does this open the risk for BiblePay to be compromised, it also makes BOINC a target for hackers looking to make money, you mention in the wiki that you the developer will intervere if something doesn't seem right in the BOINC data however this would still centralise the coin around you (not that I don't like you or trust you Rob it's just a bad idea from a security point of view).

The current proposal is untennable it centralises the blockchain in an unhealthy way around BOINC and the developer; Satoshi Nakamoto wrote Bitcoin the way it is because a crypto-currency should require no trust it should be verifiable and decentralised in my professional opinion the current proposal unfortunatly does not meet these criteria.

I am however a big fan of using blockchain technology to help scientific research, we could perhaps integrate such functionality in to the pool (subsidising those who do research), or perhaps we could open a contest to see what ideas the community have in order to further the goal of helping scientific research without bringing the network in danger.

Hi Swongel,

Thanks for the concerns.  Yes, I have addressed all of these (no new concerns posted here), and will give an opinion on each risk.

"I don't think the current proposel meets the criterea to remain a fair crypto currency. "
-> Assuming you mean using proof-of-dc as a consensus would not allow us to be mined fairly

"Relying on a single entity like BOINC to maintain a database of shares for mining even when verfied by
 a consensus system like masternodes would centralise the crypto currency and would allow hackers to unfairly edit the blockchain."

-> I've studied this for years now (no seriously, Ive beein a boinc researcher for over 5 years and used Gridcoin for mining for years before creating Biblepay), and have come to the conclusion the risk of hacking into the Rosetta SQL server is low.  (It has NOT happened to Gridcoin yet- all that happened to them was something to do with neural consensus security).  Also let us clarify 'single entity', as Rosetta has tens of management servers, and we gather the credits from the daily Rosetta credit dump files on their web farm, not from a single centralized entity other than Rosetta.  There is no way for me, Togo, any Biblepay admin to edit this file, and it is downloaded by 10% of Biblepays Sanctuaries and voted on by the Sancs, and it is downloaded from the Rosetta farm, not from a single entity.


In addition, I assert that the way we pull the daily total credit and RAC numbers, we could detect and eliminate most hacking attempts (where numbers have been modified, as the constituents per host wont add up to the last totals or avg RAC), and if a layman were to hack in to the Rosetta SQL credit servers, that is most likely what would happen.  I havent seen it happen yet. 

"it also makes BOINC a target for hackers looking to make money, you mention in the wiki that you the developer will intervere if something doesn't seem right in the BOINC data however this would still centralise the coin around you (not that I don't like you or trust you Rob it's just a bad idea from a security point of view).
"

I don't see a risk here, because Rosetta is serving millions of users, and the integrity of their SQL server is paramount.  If its been hacked, it will become obvious in our reports, as something will not match.  Id rather focus on writing reports that ensure all the numbers roll up correctly. 


In summary, I view the use of Rosetta/BOINC a good tool to divert wasted heat from POW mining to something useful, the RAC we harvest in the Sanctuary Quorum accurate per researcher, and very hard to hack (as hard as someone hacking into Kelloggs to change the cornflake text)

and finally this is the big one:
Comparing pure-POW, DC, and POL:  DC beats pure-POW with the botnet any day, as right now in Prod, using the holy grail of security (IE the Status Quo, Bitcoin-heat mining) we have 93% of our traffic being solved on an "anonymous botnet" some where between Russia and China and our pool of registered users only solves 7% of the traffic.  Meaning that technically 93% of our POW budget is going down the toilet.

Even if the DC system was hacked twice a year and I had some extravagant report detecting and kicking off anyone with more than 100 machines in cancer research I argue that would be 10* better than what we have (it would be over 90% accurate), we would have diverted 90% of the heat into useful science. 


And finally, its easier to be nimble with DC than with POW.  The cat & mouse game is almost impossible with a hard fork miner.  With DC we have years of work being poured into the CPU algorithm, that is almost impossible to duplicate the work unit scanning result of a protien fold.  What am I talking about?  Im saying that 100 developers spent 5 years of time and effort to stack libs on top of medical libs into the 79 meg EXE, to calculate the results of a protein fold.  Those results are sent to the rosetta server for analysis.  Rosetta only approves the work units that pass vigorous testing.  Thats like having a team of 100 devs + 10 admins running the decentralized "credit checking algorithm" of an advanced scientific cancer-mining system offloaded from our core.  Give it a chance, I think time will bear out the fruits of the system.

And finally there is no way for me to step in and edit anything - 10% of the sancs pull the file from Rosetta, and hash it, and vote on it.  All I can do is send a SPORK in to disable PODC (thats if we find out Rosetta was compromised).  Then I can re-enable it when we find the system is back up.



  • Rob Andrews
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Hi Rob,


"I don't see a risk here, because Rosetta is serving millions of users, and the integrity of their SQL server is paramount.  If its been hacked, it will become obvious in our reports, as something will not match.  Id rather focus on writing reports that ensure all the numbers roll up correctly.  "

This is not verifiable we'd have to take your word for it, also this still means the network will be centralised. Why even make a cryptocurrency if we're going to trust a centralised system we might as well just use VISA or MasterCard and simply donate 10% to orphans.
Allowing this change of the consensus algorithm would break the trustless nature of crypto currency as put forth by Satoshi Nakamoto as described in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper.

We cannot give up the fundamental principles of crypto currency to stop this bot net even if it would benefit scientific research it would be breaking the fundamental decentralised nature of crypto currency.

We cannot trust BOINC not to be hacked
We cannot trust BOINC not to alter results
We cannot trust BOINC not to block account
We cannot trust you or whomever soley to steer the blockchain (even if only intended in case of system failure).

Additionally this will make BOINC a target for hackers not only to infiltrate but also to  launch other exploits such as social engineering and denial of service attacks negatively impacting them especially when BiblePay will grow.

It is my professional opinion that a system wherein we depend on a third party for record keeping even if validated is fundamentally flawed and unsuitable for block chain consensus.

I would study the BOINC system a little more before fluffing them off as an entity that can be hacked.

I believe this system is going to maintain an accuracy level of 99.9% over time, and that as compared to pure-POW with a botnet stealing 93% of our valuable users hashpower is a 93% improvement.

I agree that POL may solve the botnet problem, but POL does not solve the heat problem, but Rosetta solves both.  So it still trumps both systems.

PODC is still the best for the future of Biblepay.

If there is an actual hacking target vector, please do the exact research on it and lets try to hack it.  There is not a high risk target hack vector here.



  • Rob Andrews
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It looks like Gridcoin is now #1 in the world (by RAC):

https://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/team/detail/118094994/charts

With over 60,000 servers connected to BOINC.

What do you say if we give them a little healthy competition with Cancer Research boys?

#1 in the world:
https://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/team/detail/118094994/overview


I think we can overtake the US Navy if we try.

« Last Edit: February 07, 2018, 08:02:40 AM by Rob A. »


  • Rob Andrews
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"If there is an actual hacking target vector, please do the exact research on it and lets try to hack it.  There is not a high risk target hack vector here."

We cannot trust this because we cannot verify this.
Trusting a single system is against the fundamentals of Crypto Currency:

I quote from Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper:

Trusting a single third-party is a violation of these fundamentals, I urge you to reconsider the ramifications this will have.

I argue that coinbase transactions (novel mining rewards) are a different animal than peer to peer transactions in the wallet.

Besides, we still have pobh for the core consensus for block security, however the lions share of the mining are airdropped in a superblock for PODC, to encourage cancer mining instead of scaling up the heat mining side.

I believe the tenants of Satoshis paper are still being upheld.



  • Rob Andrews
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The resource to print new Bible Pay, in this proposal partially delegated to BOINC is one of the resources which should be protected by the block chain, in this proposal this is not true therefor it breaks the tenants of Satoshi's white paper.

Further more this wouldn't stop bot nets since they could just as easily switch to the new BOINC alogrithm as well still keeping their current computing resources relative to the rest of the network.

Again trusting a third party for anything in the block chain it being the ability to print money, verify transactions or communications is against the fundamentals of the decentralised nature of block chain technology.

 

It is fine if botnets want to participate in cancer research.  And by giving the botnet a CPID and allowing us to see how many CPUs and CPUtypes and clockcycles and revisions are running it gives us valuable insight into the botnet, therefore, it is entirely different than we have now, and with that activity, I argue that it is beneficial, and no longer a nuisance, therefore I would not call it a botnet at that point. 

I jokingly say botnet because we have no control over their upgrades, however with Rosetta, they are at the mercy of using Rosetta, making my terminonly no longer refer to them as "nefarious" at that point.

Novel rewards through a daily superblock is not the same as minting.  Therefore this system is within the covenants of our design - and is an extension to what satoshi originally envisioned in the protocol.

Im sorry that you feel threatened by this idea for some reason, but I strongly believe the good in this outweighs the risk by a magnitude.


  • togoshigekata
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FoldingCoin - HackerNews
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8962896

Gridcoin - The Bad
https://web-in-security.blogspot.ca/2017/08/gridcoin-bad.html
https://github.com/Erkan-Yilmaz/GRC/issues/34

How does GRC "securely" reward BOINC computations?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/5w4v4i/how_does_grc_securely_reward_boinc_computations/

"nevertheless destroyable by a malicious actor with reasonable funding, since it relies on a centralized service to distribute its data."
"there is some concern about Gridcoin's dependency on a second outside network (the various BOINC projects and statistics collections and so on) which could be an issue for people who believe that it negatively impacts Gridcoin's decentralization as compared to Bitcoin, which has no such external dependencies."
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/37276/why-cant-bitcoin-switch-over-to-gridcoins-proof-of-work-system

Gridcoin vs Golem
http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2017/05/21/why-gridcoin-beats-golem-hands-down/

===

I definitely see Swongels point and agree with his reasoning about decentralization,

But also going along that line of thinking, how truly decentralized is Bitcoin?
Theres a group of devs called Bitcoin Core that control commit access,
theres no inherent way to pay the Devs from Bitcoin itself and so they get funding from outside investors/donators that most likely have strings attached,
theres also the issue of mining becoming more and more centralized with ASICs with a few major players/groups controlling the majority of the network hash power,
Is Bitcoin decentralized?

How secure is the hardware that runs miners and nodes and wallets? Are there government backdoors built in?
How many people actually read the code that gets added to Bitcoin, How many have the skill to understand it?
Could someone pay off/bribe/blackmail all the Bitcoin devs?
Could someone hack 51% of Bitcoin's 11,000 full nodes?

Could a supercomputer come about that makes SHA 256 obsolete? How soon would we know about it?
What if the internet and computer use becomes extremely censored and monitored?
What happens if electricity across the world gets shut down?
What if the government prints more money and buys 51% of the currency?

How much does the average cryptocurrency investor or average person truly understand and care about 100% decentralization?
Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, Ripple vs Stellar

Also its kind of funny, whenever there are any issues in the crypto space (coin fork/clone, trade scam, coin scam, exchange scam, etc),
theres tons of people who want the government to step in or want to add regulation

Is rewarding scientific research worth the risk of some centralization?
Is there any way to reward science research without centralization?

Im still quite new to cryptocurrency and I only know a little, just thinking out loud, I look forward to learning more!

I think the mining cycles going towards research is pretty awesome,
though I am also slightly worried about potential security concerns,
but Im down to see how it plays out.


  • znffal
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Hi Rob,


"I don't see a risk here, because Rosetta is serving millions of users, and the integrity of their SQL server is paramount.  If its been hacked, it will become obvious in our reports, as something will not match.  Id rather focus on writing reports that ensure all the numbers roll up correctly.  "

This is not verifiable we'd have to take your word for it, also this still means the network will be centralised. Why even make a cryptocurrency if we're going to trust a centralised system we might as well just use VISA or MasterCard and simply donate 10% to orphans.
Allowing this change of the consensus algorithm would break the trustless nature of crypto currency as put forth by Satoshi Nakamoto as described in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper.

We cannot give up the fundamental principles of crypto currency to stop this bot net even if it would benefit scientific research it would be breaking the fundamental decentralised nature of crypto currency.

We cannot trust BOINC not to be hacked
We cannot trust BOINC not to alter results
We cannot trust BOINC not to block account
We cannot trust you or whomever soley to steer the blockchain (even if only intended in case of system failure).

Additionally this will make BOINC a target for hackers not only to infiltrate but also to  launch other exploits such as social engineering and denial of service attacks negatively impacting them especially when BiblePay will grow.

It is my professional opinion that a system wherein we depend on a third party for record keeping even if validated is fundamentally flawed and unsuitable for block chain consensus.

Hi Swongel,
Great to see you are passionate! I am not an expert in centralised/decentralised anything! But I just thought I'd add my two cents.

"We cannot give up the fundamental principles of crypto currency to stop this bot net"

For me I would say that we can't give up on our fundamental principles as Christians to help where we can, even at the cost of some centralisation. For me personally, if it is a choice between a level of centralisation and the ability to contribute to finding the cure for cancer, then I will always choose the latter.

I agree with you that the botnets could just simply switch over to boinc, but if they did so, at least they we are adding power to Rosetta. Also I hadn't thought of the point Rob raised, that they will lose some level of anonymity in doing so.   

Anyway, that is all I am able to add without passing my ability level!
Thanks for taking the time to read and I hope you will help us work out some of these issues.


p.s. thanks to whoever (Rob?) sent me some tBBP, I think I'm all going now :)


Updated the testnet explorer. Any reason there are blocks with 6k reward for miners and others with 600?


  • Swongel
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FoldingCoin - HackerNews
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8962896

Gridcoin - The Bad
https://web-in-security.blogspot.ca/2017/08/gridcoin-bad.html
https://github.com/Erkan-Yilmaz/GRC/issues/34

How does GRC "securely" reward BOINC computations?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/5w4v4i/how_does_grc_securely_reward_boinc_computations/

"nevertheless destroyable by a malicious actor with reasonable funding, since it relies on a centralized service to distribute its data."
"there is some concern about Gridcoin's dependency on a second outside network (the various BOINC projects and statistics collections and so on) which could be an issue for people who believe that it negatively impacts Gridcoin's decentralization as compared to Bitcoin, which has no such external dependencies."
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/37276/why-cant-bitcoin-switch-over-to-gridcoins-proof-of-work-system

Gridcoin vs Golem
http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2017/05/21/why-gridcoin-beats-golem-hands-down/

===

I definitely see Swongels point and agree with his reasoning about decentralization,

But also going along that line of thinking, how truly decentralized is Bitcoin?
Theres a group of devs called Bitcoin Core that control commit access,
theres no inherent way to pay the Devs from Bitcoin itself and so they get funding from outside investors/donators that most likely have strings attached,
theres also the issue of mining becoming more and more centralized with ASICs with a few major players/groups controlling the majority of the network hash power,
Is Bitcoin decentralized?

How secure is the hardware that runs miners and nodes and wallets? Are there government backdoors built in?
How many people actually read the code that gets added to Bitcoin, How many have the skill to understand it?
Could someone pay off/bribe/blackmail all the Bitcoin devs?
Could someone hack 51% of Bitcoin's 11,000 full nodes?

Could a supercomputer come about that makes SHA 256 obsolete? How soon would we know about it?
What if the internet and computer use becomes extremely censored and monitored?
What happens if electricity across the world gets shut down?
What if the government prints more money and buys 51% of the currency?

How much does the average cryptocurrency investor or average person truly understand and care about 100% decentralization?
Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, Ripple vs Stellar

Also its kind of funny, whenever there are any issues in the crypto space (coin fork/clone, trade scam, coin scam, exchange scam, etc),
theres tons of people who want the government to step in or want to add regulation

Is rewarding scientific research worth the risk of some centralization?
Is there any way to reward science research without centralization?

Im still quite new to cryptocurrency and I only know a little, just thinking out loud, I look forward to learning more!

I think the mining cycles going towards research is pretty awesome,
though I am also slightly worried about potential security concerns,
but Im down to see how it plays out.

Hi Togo,

I'll gladly answer some of your questions:

But also going along that line of thinking, how truly decentralized is Bitcoin?

"Theres a group of devs called Bitcoin Core that control commit access,
theres no inherent way to pay the Devs from Bitcoin itself and so they get funding from outside investors/donators that most likely have strings attached,
theres also the issue of mining becoming more and more centralized with ASICs with a few major players/groups controlling the majority of the network hash power,
Is Bitcoin decentralized?"

How do get open source developers paid for their work?
First of all I'll give you a link to a Wikipedia going into detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software
But personally I would use the reputation and experience from contributing to Bitcoin software in order to get jobs or provide services to companies interested in deploying Block Chain technology this can be very lucrative. (Companies such as Red Hat and Canoncical run off this business-model).

"theres also the issue of mining becoming more and more centralized with ASICs with a few major players/groups controlling the majority of the network hash power"

Yes, unfortunatly for Bitcoin ASICS make the amount of stakeholders in mining smaller than perhaps desirable, however there are still mutliple miners who all have the incentive to act in a good way there is an financial incentive for them not to join an attack (as they might lose mined bitcoins, Section 6 of the original Bitcoin white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf).


"How secure is the hardware that runs miners and nodes and wallets?"

Software security is defined by against which threat-model a system is protected, all Intel processors for instance contain Intel Managment Engine allowing for anyone with the key to take over.  However Bitcoin is ported to many different hardware types, hardware wallets running open-hardware MIPS processors for instance would be incredibly hard to remotely exploit. Nevertheless security will and can never be completely guarenteed (anyone who does lies), however this doesn't mean all threats are equal.

"How many people actually read the code that gets added to Bitcoin, How many have the skill to understand it?"

Many people have read the original Bitcoin client source code and audited it, however Bitcoin is not software it's a protocol; there are multiple implementations audited made by different people. Most are open source, some are not; this however means that the source code cannot be changed by a single person a change in protocol must be implemented by all software implementations of Bitcoin.

Anyone understanding C++ can read the C++ implementation of Bitcoin, there are however implementations availible in Java and Python (read more: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/213pxw/what_programming_language_is_bitcoin_written_in/)


"Could someone pay off/bribe/blackmail all the Bitcoin devs?"

Unlikely but not impossible, however if people decide that a new version of the protocol is harmful they can choose to fork (such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold) this way the coin splits in two with the community choosing which version they like best and choose to use that one.

"Could someone hack 51% of Bitcoin's 11,000 full nodes?"

Yes, one would have to hack 51% of the miners however, these miners all use different software in highly secured environments, if they were to be hacked they'd notice (by missing expected Bitcoins) and look in to the problem. One would have to do a great amount of hacking in order to get 51% of all the mining capacity hacked. (in contrast to just 1 instance when using a centralised system).


"Could a supercomputer come about that makes SHA 256 obsolete? How soon would we know about it?"

This is a really hard problem in Computer Science/Maths called P!=NP, In short all modern encryption and computer security depends on this rule being true. Breaking SHA256 (I would interpret as making it trivial to reverse the hashing operation) would have huge implications to all systems (not only crypto currency, but traditional finance, government, armed forces, etc.)


"What if the internet and computer use becomes extremely censored and monitored?"

If this happens, finance is no longer of importance, freedom of communication is a basic human right worth more than any monetary amount will ever be.


"What happens if electricity across the world gets shut down?"

Solar panels and wind mills will get more expensive, money will dissapear (I personally use very little cash these days anymore with electronic payment systems being wide spread). https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-worlds-money-is-digital


"What if the government prints more money and buys 51% of the currency?"

Crypto prices will rise during this buying, unless 51% chooses to sell their crypto for now useless and inflation torn fiat currency this cannot happen. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/634/economics/the-problem-with-printing-money/


"How much does the average cryptocurrency investor or average person truly understand and care about 100% decentralization?
Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, Ripple vs Stellar"

Less than they should, decentralised trustless consensus is the basis on which crypto currency is built. How many people understand encryption? Very few, many profit from it though removing encryption from online banking for example would negatively impact all users.
That's why people like me very much try to make noise when such a thing is planned.
People holding Bible Pay share my interest of keeping the coin decentralised regardless if they understand the underlying technology, if you're interested about why this is important I recommend reading the original Bitcoin white paper of watching a video going through it in layman terms. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jOJk30eQs


"Is rewarding scientific research worth the risk of some centralization?"

No, this update might very realistically destroy the network which will have as a consequence that people will stop mining which will not only destroy the coin and take away money from orphans it will also make the added amount of compute power to research dissapear.

"Is there any way to reward science research without centralization?"

Yes, we could for example set another tithe for scientific research and donate the money to the project directly via the decentralised charity committee (master node voting). Directly rewarding researchers and allowing them to best allocate the funds to help scientific research.

I hope these answers clear up some of the questions you and others may have about this change and why there's a need to keep crypto currency decentralised.