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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.
He got off to a bad start with, "Bitcoin capitalist..."
People have some funny notions about what "capitalism" means.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
All you need to know if that there is no way for all the machines on the bitcoin network to know when one event happens before another. This is important for financial transactions. The block cipher is a proof of work function which takes some effort to compute. Since this takes a predictable amount of time to compute it can be used to establish a sense of global time and order events. It doesn't always work right away, but eventually if someone tries to double spend a bitcoin one transaction will win out. This establish the trust necessary for bitcoin to work.
The problem is bitcoin can potentially be manipulated if you get a little bit less than 1/2 of the total network computational capacity.
I have been looking at the proof of work functions that are memory hard proof of work functions because they are more expensive financially to compute. There are tons of ASICs computing those hashes right now used in bitcoin which are far cheaper than any PC, but memory in an ASIC is always expensive. You get less of an advantage.
I think momentum proof of work function has potential, but I haven't seen any crypto-currencies use it yet. Let me know if you find one.
There definitely is a potential for safer currencies than bitcoin
Can somebody translate that blog post to English from 'Self-aggrandizing twatspeak' for me? /fp
Can somebody translate OverlordQ's "twatspeak" into English for me?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Not quite accurate. Pretend rich guy is trying to stay pretend rich by rebuilding the pretend value of what makes him pretend rich. All marketing, reward is in pretend currency which will prove problematic but the pretend rich guy can hardly offer a reward in a real currency, kinda brings down the illusion of their pretend wealth, if they acknowledge the pretend currency will attract competitors. Like all ponzi schemes, they eventually inevitably implode and with them the pretend wealth.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It has "Bitcoin" in the title. Of course it got picked up.
Don't you know the rules?
Every day, there's gotta be at least one Forbes submission make it up, one hackaday, one from whatever site itwbennett is pushing these days (I don't click those links), and one Bitcoin story.
It's like clockwork. Things are a little shaken up with week what with all the changes happening around here, but they'll get their groove back soon enough.
Log in or piss off.
It's not pretend rich if people actually accept his pretend currency for actual goods and services.
Make no mistake, the people at the top of the Ponzi pyramid have a shit load of very real money at the end of it. It's just that it usually gets taken away by the government when they're hauled off to jail before they can escape with it.
It is pretend rich if you can't liquidate without tanking your commodity. If you had a ten thousand dollars of manure you could probably move that to dollars by selling it as fertilizer. If you haf ten million dollars of it, good luck finding a buyer without tanking the market.
Like that except with a non-thing without the inherent value of shit.
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...
This story appears to have nothing to do with the block hash function. He wants a block cipher that takes 64kb keys.
See that "Preview" button?
If you had a ten thousand dollars of manure you could probably move that to dollars by selling it as fertilizer. If you haf ten million dollars of it, good luck finding a buyer without tanking the market.
You're not comparing the same thing. If you liquidate the same proportion of *ANY* market, it will have the same effect. If Apple tired to liquidate it's entire stock holding you don't think it too would tank?
It has "Bitcoin" in the title. Of course it got picked up.
Don't you know the rules?
Every day, there's gotta be at least one Forbes submission make it up, one hackaday, one from whatever site itwbennett is pushing these days (I don't click those links), and one Bitcoin story.
It's like clockwork. Things are a little shaken up with week what with all the changes happening around here, but they'll get their groove back soon enough.
Don't forget 3D printing and Drones. How will we ever survive without another story about 3D printing?
Imagine if someone bought a 3D printed drone using Bitcoin? Would the universe end?
Just thinking out loud: *maybe* what he means is that current 'disk'-like encryption mechanisms suck (like XTS, which they don't have to do, but which in practice they do). Or maybe he wants a proper encryption scheme, based on asymmetric cryptography (so that I can properly package a file just for you), which can be done (PKCS#1, ECIES, etc) - but there you basically package a symmetric key under a single stroke of asymmetric encryption, and follow up with the symmetric ecryption of the payload itself, which admittedly feels like a bit of a hack (mixing up crypto means you may be more vulnerable).
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Well, now, 3D printing is only scheduled as a weekly guaranteed submission. You're being thrown off by the intersection between 3D printing and guns, which is a slam dunk for the front page.
Drones are a bit more sporadic; I haven't quite figured out the cycle. It's not daily, but it's more frequent than weekly.
Log in or piss off.