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The World's First Blockchain Smartphone Is In Development (engadget.com)
A company called Sirin Labs is developing an open-source smartphone that runs on a fee-less blockchain. "The Finney -- named in honor of bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney -- will be the only smartphone in the world that's fully secure and safe enough to hold cryptographic coins," reports Engadget. The company is launching a crowdsale event this October (date to be confirmed) to support the phone's development. From the report: According to Sirin, all Finney devices (there's an all-in-one PC coming, too) will form an independent blockchain network powered by IOTA's Tangle technology. The network will operate without centralized backbones or mining centers cluttering up the transaction process, using the SRN token as its default currency (only SRN token holders will be able to purchase the device). And it'll all run on a Sirin operating system specially designed to support blockchain applications such as crypto wallets and secure exchange access. The phone comes with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a device with a $1,000 price tag, including a 256GB internal memory and 16MP camera, plus a hefty suite of security measures.
This place is a wasteland
nothing else to say
A $1,000 smartphone with 0 apps.
Sounds like a luddite phone to me.
Isn't the only benefit of a blockchain is to replace a single trusted server with distributed authority. How does that help with a local device (aka a smartphone)?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It will also be first fully secure system ever created.
Is Slashdot done with the lengthy downtime? Or is the management intent on migrating the site to Windows 10 servers running IIS? What is going on here?!?
Sure it will take 2-3 weeks to send and receive each text message, but boy will it be worth it to know my dick pics are secure!
That is quite some buzzword soup right there...
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
Without AI, it's already outdated before it is released....
My toilet uses a block chain and it is glorious.
And what makes a "blockchain" phone more secure than a "non-blockchain" one?
Blockchain is an algorithm; or I suppose it could be viewed as an architectural viewpoint. But until someone says exactly what problem they are using blockchain to solve (and how) there's absolutely no reason to believe a "Blockchain Phone" would be any more secure than an ordinary phone running blockchain apps.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/faulty_data_center_takes_out_sourceforge/
Anyone know why /. was offline for most of the day today?
Will this phone only support the Finney Coins or will it support other coins too? Seems like launching a mobile device along with their new ICO. Having a secure computing device would of course be helpful and an apprehension to many currently-( besides the coin bubble risks, getting ripped off / hacked also a concern e.g Mt Vox). Maybe team up with Essential they seem to have capital $ and Rubin's name. Meanwhile Japan banks are looking to launch J-Coin digital currency. An established device manufacturer plus banks could help launch devices and block chains folks might be more accepting. Getting a large base of users the challenge.
Is it secure enough to hold docco.in s?
I still have no idea what the blockchain is used for. It's just a mobile wallet app on a fancy phone, or does it have something to do with the "phone" functions?
Granted.. I'm suspending a lotta obvious disbelief about this being a real product.
It's the new Beowulf cluster.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Naked and petrified, in hot grits.
Only 30 minutes, as it's constantly mining.
As you know, there are 4 types of CPU's: von Neumann architecture, Harvard architecture, Bose-Einstein and blockchain.
Blockchain CPU's are self-cleansing, because they run entirely on hot air.
Coincidentally, I was just reading about Iota yesterday. The super-condensed summary, for /.ers who don't want to look it up: Instead of a linear blockchain, you have a directed, acyclic graph with multiple "last transactions". In order to carry out a transaction yourself, you must do a unit of work to create a node (block) that incorporates two previous transactions. Hence, there are no miners, and also no transaction fees. Those are the positives.
The Iota whitepaper mentions a number of - as yet unresolved - problems. For example, double-spending is entirely possible. In addition, my first impression is that you simply have to trust that everyone is running software that honestly implements the algorithm. For example, part of your duty when creating a node is to check past transactions for consistency. What if you deliberately fail to do that, because the inconsistent transactions are to your benefit? In addition, the directed graph can diverge for long periods of time - indeed, diverging branches never need to be reconnected - so there are a lot of potential ways to cheat.
Maybe a failure of understanding on my part, but: I don't understand cryptocurrencies where all currency units are created in the genesis block. Maybe the algorithm is a fun technical toy, never meant to be used in reality? Otherwise, why should anyone use a currency where one person initially holds all the wealth?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This startup is one of Moshe Hogeg's startups. It's probably a money-laundering vaporware product, as none of his previous startups have actually done anything.
Note that this is the guy behind the infamous Yo app.
I don't think I want my cellphone AND my crypto-wallet stolen from me at once. That's a huge design flaw. Plus a known for shit company with known for shit CEO doing biometrics + behavior on me and with encrypted connections to their mothership.
There's no proof they can deliver secure products and there's nothing about anonymity which is the key for a real-world secure device.
I want my offline blockchain wallet in a secure place, and on me just spare change... probably on paper or an anonymous cryptocoin.
Last note: it's not really opensource, there's no word on the baseband.
The only smartphone that is secure enough to hold cryptocurrency is the the one that is not connected to anything at all.
How about a smartphone that sells for, say, $200 to $300, that's actually secure, instead of the 'security collander' that pretty much any smartphone currently is?
That's the main reason why I don't have or want a smartphone: total lack of security, and for that matter, a total lack of access to the OS at the level needed to make it secure.
Until such an animal exists I'll just stick with the cheap-ass $50 dumbphone, that stays turned off 95% of the day anyway, and which is probably not hackable (or at least not hackable in any significant way).
My topic is nothing new. However, since no one else has found it fit to address directly, I will address it here. Alas, listing all of our nation's woes that are directly caused by Pres. Donald J. Trump would take up far too much of this letter: the spread of negativism; a newfound interest by oleaginous loonies in palming off our present situation as the compelling ground for worldwide despotism; the increasing number of people who believe that we ought to worship inarticulate, sanctimonious geeks as folk heroes; and so forth. Hence, to keep this letter to the point, I will limit its focus to a discussion of how Trump's attempts to perpetuate myths that glorify Tartuffism are much worse than mere Mohockism. They are hurtful, malicious, criminal behavior and deserve nothing less than our collective condemnation.
I know very few cheeky, featherbrained dodos personally, but I know them well enough to surmise that what I have been writing up to this point is not what I initially intended to write in this letter. Instead, I decided it would be far more productive to tell you that Trump may have access to weapons of mass destruction. Then again, I consider him to be a weapon of mass destruction himself. It is naïve to expect his Maoism outfit to drift naturally toward some sort of moral center. It will not. It has not. And, as we all know, whenever Trump is blamed for conspiring to gain a respectable foothold for his unambitious traducements, he blames his assistants. Doing so reinforces their passivity and obedience and increases their guilt, shame, terror, and conformity, thereby making them far more willing to help Trump trivialize certain events that are particularly special to us all.
Trump is a pathetic excuse for a human being. It's hard to argue, from that standpoint, that it's not worth examining the notion that Trump speaks like a true defender of the status quo—a status quo, we should not forget, that enables him to fan the flames of warlordism into a planet-spanning inferno. The gloss that his fans put on his execrations unfortunately does little to step back and consider the problem of Trump's codices in the larger picture of popular culture imagery. Alas, I don't know for sure that Trump is planning on unleashing an overbearing extremism on society. For now the reader is left to reach his or her own conclusions regarding Trump's possible conspiracy to operate on a criminal—as opposed to a civil disobedience—basis. Perhaps the reader will conclude that Trump is mostly innocent. Or perhaps the reader will conclude that when one actually reads Trump's rambling missives, which I recommend one do, it's hard to tell whether he's disagreeing with me or making my point. In any event, I stick with my own view, which is that Trump uses the word “undiscriminatingness” to justify turning our country into a place where liberty is always under assault, where passion—the very stuff of life—is extinguished. In doing so, he is reversing the meaning of that word as a means of disguising the fact that he will do everything in his power to create a climate of intimidation. No wonder corruption is endemic to our society; Trump's ability to escape punishment for bombarding unsuspecting civilians with vicious waves of chemicals or disease indeed tells us one thing. It tells us that our passage to Perdition has been booked. I believe it also tells us that even when the facts don't fit, Trump sometimes tries to use them anyway. He still maintains, for instance, that it is his moral imperative to sacrifice our essential liberties on the altar of political horse-trading.
Trump is willing to promote truth and justice when it's convenient. But when it threatens his creature comforts, Trump throws principle to the wind. According to some data he claims to have, just about everyone wants Trump to create a regime of querulous, clueless cronyism. Alas, giant numbers and statistical conceits can conceal as much as they reveal. The reality is that some of the facts I'm about to p
Disavow this phone! Blockchain spelled backwards is SATAN! Repent now and save your soul!
What the fuck did I just read. Lay of the crack, buddy.
Also just because you barfed up the last thesaurus you ate, it doesn't make any of what you said sane.
I can confirm that the OP is 100% True, verified fact. The AC commenting above me does not know what he's talking about.
'Nuff said.
And...how is it any more secure than any other phone?
The fundamentals of security don't depend on a phone being a "blockchain phone," whatever that means. In any case, blockchain isn't about higher security, it relies standard encryption algorithms.
Maybe "blockchain" is just a label to sell a product?