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Bitcoin Capitalist Opens Bounty For New Block Cipher
An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin capitalist Mircea Popescu has opened a contest to find a new block cipher and is offering a 10 Bitcoin reward for a winning submission. The eccentric Popescu was previously featured on Slashdot for saving OpenBSD from their electric bill in their time of need.
Can somebody translate that blog post to English from 'Self-aggrandizing twatspeak' for me? /fp
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Or Icebergian.
You are welcome on my lawn.
People who view others simply by personality traits are missing out. Yeah, so the guy talks like an arrogant twat, is he wrong?
You see, your attacking him on something completely irrelevant, simply because it is easier than to actually discuss the merits of what he was saying.
Keep in mind, he may be brilliant or he may be a complete loon, I am not judging either here, just your rebuttal, which amounts to "Big Fat Ugly ... do not like", which actually makes you exactly who hate the most, an arrogant twat. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Whoever he is: $4000 doesn't sound like much of a prize to me.
Hey, we can't all be Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison or John McAfee!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
he's just some random narcissist/megalomaniac who got lucky as an early adopter, runs a shady "unregistered corporation" and hides behind unenforceable legalese in his "corporate" governance docs to deny personal liability when the illegal sites he runs eventually turn any meaningful profit and garners the attention of taxing authorities. He also routinely claims to have singlehandedly saved bitcoin from imploding on itself by creating markets... that nobody actually uses. Now that he's effectively been shown to have been completely irrelevant in any measureable way in the bitcoin world, he's trying to create something new so he can claim to be its inventor...even though he has made no attempt to do anything himself on the matter (because he has very little in the way of actual coding skill, despite his claims to the contrary).
Oh, and saying any of this to his face will make him turn purple and scream and cry like a little girl (can't find the video offhand, but nobody like him in his home town and there is a video of him getting reamed by an older gentleman for being a little prick to everyone around him in some town hall meeting, and the twat just starts crying. It's painful to watch, really) - or, instead of crying, depending on which side of the manic/depressive bed he woke up on, he may just ignore the objector and insult them on multi-page rants about how the little people should stop talking so the betters can speak...something along those lines, I know I've seen "betters" bandied around a lot in places he tries to insert himself into, although I've seen very little of him recently since he's slipped down far enough into obscurity because the relevant people have learned to ignore him like the funny cousin nobody wants to invite to the family reunion. (And not funny "ha-ha", funny as in "hide the alcohol, he might have snorted his meds again, and someone predial the police, this may get ugly".) Sycophants hope he just pisses himself enough to want to pay even more for buying his "friends", in addition to the hookers he regularly trots out.
parent here - I forgot to mention, the "anonymous" submitter is no doubt himself. He's just that vain, and nobody else would bother trying to promote his site. He must be starting to get really lonely by now.
Really? Every single person makes judgements by personality traits alone (or at least primarily?)
I certainly don't. Such considerations aren't just pointless, they are wrong. Considering how politics is going, you can see the skillful liar and charmer scamming millions of people because he had a "better personality" than a better man, who wasn't quite as charming. So we miss out on someone who might be a good person in favor of a charming sociopath. All because of "personality".
How is that working out?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Talking like an "arrogant twat" is subjective criticism. As such has no merits on anything useful. To me, you talk like a "arrogant twat", which makes you wrong. See how easy that was to dismiss you?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This isn't about right or wrong. There's no logical fallacy here. This is simply about whether or not we even want to hear what he has to say, based on how he's saying it. You can choose on your own.
Aren't there tens or hundreds of alt coins that have been doing exactly this?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Politics going...? Sorry, but it is long gone. Personal integrity in politics is the exception, not the rule. But you know that.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Also, he awards bonus points for proofs of hardness. No one has managed to prove hardness for any existing block cipher. Block ciphers are simply ways to jumble the plaintext up in a reversible fashion. They are not based on difficult mathematical problems.
Proving hardness is something you do for asymmetrical ciphers, but asymmetrical ciphers are way too slow to be useful for actual messages.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Wow, TEN whole Bitcoins for improving how it works? Why not offer 30 million Dogecoins, at least you wouldn't look so cheap.
And, in my opinion, worthy of a 4000 BTC prize, not 4000 USD.
What is wrong with existing block ciphers like AES?
AES has been in widespread use for over a decade and to the best of my knowledge, there is still no practical attack on it (unless someone has built a working quantum computer and not told anyone about it). Its totally free of patents and IP issues. Its been implemented in a huge variety of hardware and software (including the Intel CPU that I am using to make this posting).
Even the NSA trusts AES enough to certify it for use protecting top secret information.
This might be worth a read before selecting transformations. CNSA-Suite-and-Quantum-Computing-FAQ.pdf
I don't really see why a 64 kB key is a useful feature for a block cipher. 256 bits has sufficient entropy to render any brute force attack, and even severe weakening (e.g. sq root effort attacks) utterly infeasible.
Are large block sizes really that necessary? I can see why a 4 kB block size might be useful for block storage, but there are method of chaining smaller block ciphers so as to effect a larger block size. So why would a native 64 kB block size be desirable? Use of chaining or counter techniques should prevent details of large scale structures from bleeding into the ciphertext.
This is likely not for *encryption*.
First, you need to understand how proof of work functions are currently constructed. The most popular ones today are based off of HashCash in that they use hashes because block ciphers aren't really big enough to create usable hard functions and scalable work functions, (e.g., AES is only 128-bit).
IF (big-IF), there were a secure large block cipher, you could use a different construction for proof of work. For example, you could put the block data you want to protect as the key and attempt find some input data that created your reward address + some variable amount of random crap to scale the work function. Of course, that's probably not very secure as you might want some additional precomputation protection similar to how message authentication codes are made out of block ciphers (CMAC), but hopefully this simple example illustrates the point.
Typical design mechanisms used to make block ciphers wider will necessarily make them deeper (e.g., to get good bit diffusion, you need to have lots of rounds of a typical cipher construction) and thus not very practical for actual encryption. Simple mechanism to encrypt larger blocks (like CBC or counter-mode), offer some amount of diffusion, but in such a structured way which has certain vulnerabilities and even their security often require nonces (which don't work well in a proof of work application).
Anyhow, it would be a bunch of work for 10 BTC. Hardly worth anyone's time, given this bozo is gonna take all the credit, you probably don't even get fame nor fortune...
Can you produce the link to said video? It would increase your credibility here.
You can listen to sweet lies, or you can listen to cold hard truth. I know people would rather listen to lies told sweetly than someone speaking truth.
I've started saying "Am I wrong" when people dismiss what I say, because of how I say it, not because of the content of my message. "You're mean" "Am I wrong?" "well no ... but .... "
Done.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.