Except that there will always been more demand for national currencies than there will be for Bitcoin, and so over the long term we should expect Bitcoin's value to decline. Trying to bet on it being exchangeable for dollars for any period of time is speculation, which gets back to my original point: Bitcoin's value is almost entirely due to speculation.
There's no reason it can't exist as a niche currency
OK, I'll grant that -- Bitcoin might live on as an obscure, niche currency with extremely limited utility. Not even the black market users will stick with it in that case, and perhaps people will realize that there are more effective digital cash systems out there that could be deployed in a way that benefits society (not just the black market).
Even with the above reasoning, Bitcoin can still survive if there are enough situations where no currency is de jure standard and Bitcoin has a considerable advantage. Black market for sure, and gray market might be a good candidate for it.
In which case it would only take a digital currency system that does not suffer from Bitcoin's inherent scalability problem -- the fact that the computational resources needed for Bitcoin grow with the number of Bitcoin transactions, a fact that is inherent in all digital cash systems and that is typically resolved by means of a central issuing authority that can "renew" tokens -- to kill of Bitcoin. If the only advantage Bitcoin has is that it is a digital cash system, it is only a matter of time before it dies and all the people who bought into the system but did not have a chance to cash out have to eat the loss.
Yours is a bleak perspective though
Probably because Bitcoin is a badly designed system. Interesting as a mental exercise, but ultimately doomed. Worse still, Bitcoin has become synonymous with digital cash, which means that better systems have even worse chances of being adopted, especially once Bitcoin fails.
they have already begun by taking the mining out of the default client
This makes the scalability problem even worse, since it forces you to reuse older tokens, which have already grown because of their use in previous transactions. This is not a problem that you can just hack your way around, it is a fundamental limitation of digital cash systems. Note that on the very page you linked to, they attempt to sidestep this problem by claiming that hard drive sizes will grow to accommodate their needs, which I seriously doubt unless Bitcoin remains an obscure payment system.
The black market already holds its own to the deman for national currency and the black market is growing with time - it is very likely that within the next decade or two it may outpace the regulated one. With half the world's population already employed in the black market it is not much of a stretch to think that you don't need a government to back a currency, if the incentives are right for the market to protect it itself.
It is very much a stretch to think that money can exist without government backing. If the black market stopped using national currencies, they would be forced to switch to a currency backed by some other large, powerful organization to enforce payments, and that organization would be a de facto government. Money is only valuable within some enforcement structure, which is the role that a government plays; even when banks issue currency, they rely on governments to enforce debt payments.
And you could say by the same metric that trade in physical goods, whether coins or paper bills have been a 'necessary' component...until the digital banking started to take over in the 80's or so. Just because something has always been part of the economy does not mean that it is necessary. That is a correlation vs. causation error in thinking.
Except that we still trade in physical goods (and even if all currency were digital cash, you would still trade in physical goods -- you need food, clothing, etc.), and we have had paper transactions managed by banks for centuries (which have simply moved computers, which are more efficient record keeping systems).
At a basic level, credit is necessary in any economy because people with the skills needed to complete a task do not always have the resources needed for that task. A farmer might not have enough money to buy the fertilizer he needs for a particular growing season, a cook might not have the resources needed to start a restaurant, etc. At an even more fundamental level, you might need to work before you are able to pay the soldiers that protect you from a hostile enemy, but those soldiers need to be paid while they are busy protecting you; taxes themselves are a form of debt, and governments cannot function without tax revenue.
The unfortunate thing about Bitcoin is that people have come to associate Bitcoin with digital cash. There are plenty of other digital cash systems that have all of Bitcoin's advantages without the serious disadvantages; those systems use a bank or other token issuing authority to renew tokens that have long transaction chains (thus avoiding the scalability problem) and are easy to back with a national currency, or perhaps to use as a national currency. Anarchists may not like the idea of a bank having power over currency, but that is just how currencies work: some central authority must back the currency. I am personally a big fan of digital cash, since it would solve a lot of the security problems that we see with debit and credit cards, but because of the various crypto battles and patents in the 90s digital cash never did take off.
There's a considerable demographic in the Bitcoin community...who would very much prefer if they could trade it back and forth as an isolated currency
Unless they live outside the jurisdiction of any effective government, they will have to find at least enough of some nation's currency to pay their taxes (which in some nations includes taxes on transactions made using Bitcoin, which cannot themselves be paid using Bitcoin). I sincerely doubt that these users live under such circumstances, and even if they did, they would also have to find a way to generate electricity and connect to the Internet without incurring any costs other than Bitcoin, which is also an unlikely event. Either these people are paying the fees associated with using Bitcoin (energy, bandwidth, property taxes, etc.) using some other currency that they have obtained by some other means (and which will still affect the value of Bitcoin because of its use in paying for Bitcoin infrastructure) or they are going to have to trade their Bitcoins for some other currency at some point.
Aside from some toy examples, Bitcoin is never going to be anything more than a proxy for some other currency. There is no way for Bitcoin to scale (even if we ignore the technical problems with Bitcoin scalability) to anything that even resembles a national economy without some government "backing" it (that is, enforcing the payment of debt using Bitcoin). That is not going to happen, for various reasons, the most prominent being that governments like to be able to control the amount of currency in circulation and Bitcoin makes that impossible.
We go through this discussion every single time a Bitcoin article appears on Slashdot. Bitcoin is guaranteed to fail in the long run:
It is a digital cash system in which the tokens cannot be refreshed; this is known in crypto research community to imply that the tokens must grow linearly in the number of transactions. Bitcoin attempts to hide this fact in its architecture, but if Bitcoin is secure then the computation resources needed to continue using Bitcoin will grow over time. Worse, as more people use Bitcoin, the growth rate will accelerate because of the increased number of transactions. If Bitcoin was used at anything close to the number of dollar transactions that happen every day, the technical limitations of Bitcoin would kill it off within a week's time.
Useful digital cash systems involve a central issuing authority like a bank or government, that can accept old tokens and produce "fresh" tokens of equal value. Having such a central authority is not a bad thing:
The demand for Bitcoin will never exceed the demand for national currencies. Using the USA as an example, people who live in America must pay taxes -- taxes on income, taxes on property, sometimes taxes on purchases they make, and so forth. The government only accepts tax payments that are made in dollars, and yes, you have to pay taxes on transactions that do not involve dollars, such as barter or having a Bitcoin salary. Every year, hundreds of millions of Americans must pay their taxes, and if they were all using Bitcoin for everything, they would all simultaneously try to trade their Bitcoins for dollars to cover their tax debt. While this frequently happens with other currencies -- people paid in pounds sterling will try to make a similar trade -- all national currencies are demanded by some nation's citizens for a similar purpose, unlike Bitcoin, which nobody is legally obligated to use.
It is a good thing that nobody is obligated to use BItcoin to pay their debts, because:
Bitcoin is a deflationary currency -- there is a fixed maximum number of Bitcoins that can exist. If you had a long-term debt to repay in Bitcoins, it would be harder to make payments as time went on, because Bitcoins would become harder to find (assuming that the Bitcoin economy continues to grow, which I already noted is an unlikely event). You would be a fool to ever incur a Bitcoin debt for this very reason. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, credit is a necessary component of any economy; this has been a fact of life for so long that it not only predates paper currency, but paper itself.
Sure there will -- you can grow some marijuana and trade that for Bitcoins. Except that the only reason anyone does such a thing right now is because they want to trade the Bitcoins for their nation's currency.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Without speculation, Bitcoin is worthless. The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on -- something which there is never any guarantee of (compare to private currencies that are backed by national currencies). This is in stark contrast to national currencies like dollars, which people must have if they intend to pay their taxes (which they must do if they intend to legally own property, hold a job, etc.). Nobody actually needs to use Bitcoin, no governments accept Bitcoin for tax purposes, no banks accept Bitcoin as a repayment on debt, and its technical advantages as a digital cash system are neither unique nor anything close to a justification for its value.
When Bitcoin exchanges die, Bitcoin will die too. If people cannot buy into the system or cash out, the system will come grinding to a halt.
Money is not fiction, it is a mechanism that governments and banks can use. Dollars not valuable simply because people believe they are valuable, they are valuable because the US government requires a large group of people to use dollars (i.e. to pay taxes and other debts). People believe dollars are valuable because all the tax-paying and otherwise indebted citizens around them demand dollars as payment, because they need those dollars if they do not want the government to take their property or freedom. As long as people agree to be governed by the US government, currency issued by the government will have value.
Nobody is required to use Bitcoin, which is why it is so volatile (its value is based entirely on speculation) and will ultimately fail (as people demand dollars and other currencies more than they demand Bitcoin).
On the other hand, China might not care which American corporations they can read the emails of; they might just take whatever they can get. For a targeted attach, this is going to be hard to exploit -- it is like trying to guess one of the primes in an RSA number.
Worse still, it may be the case that some particular software product or setup is causing these keys to be generated; this could make it easier to attack people using that software. Those weak keys might have been generated by a cloud service provider's VM images, or by a particular OS installer or software installation package, or by some common IT practice involving the management of large numbers of systems.
a recipe for creating an engineering product is also abstract. For example, a sequence of steps A, B, C in manufacturing product X is abstract, until it is implemented in some concrete product.
Unless it can be implemented, however, an engineering design is not useful at all. Simulating a car is very much different from having a car, simulating a circuit is very different from having a circuit, etc. Descriptions of engineered systems are not useful (other than as a way to teach engineering students); yet a description of an algorithm is the only thing that you really want. This is where the difference between an engineering design and a software system lies: a description of software is actually more useful than a physically realized version of the software (remember video game cartridges? Now imagine a world where all the programs you use were like that -- circuits that you had to plug in to your monitor, keyboard, and hard drive).
From reading this new paper, what these guys have been able to do is to take a pair of public keys and identify if one or both of the large secret prime numbers is the same between both keys. Am I reading things right, is this what they have found?
Correct.
I would assume that unless you can find (using this new discovery) a public key where one or both of P and Q match a key you already have the private half of, you cant decrypt.
Not correct; if you have two RSA keys with a common prime factor, you can use the GCD to determine what that common prime is (normally, the GCD would be 1, because the two moduli would have no common factors), and then simply divide by that prime to determine both of the secret keys. The keys with common prime factors are effectively worthless, and worse still, someone happening to generate one of the same primes that you generated will leak your secret key to the entire world.
Now, to be fair, DSA and ElGamal have a similar problem when it comes to nonces; see, for example, the Debian bug, the Sony bugy, etc. The real lesson here is that good random number generation is vital to public key cryptography (but we knew that already) and that you should be extra cautious when generating your RSA keys (or when using your DSA and ElGamal keys).
The issue here is not the value of the inputs or outputs, but the abstract nature. We are not supposed to grant patents on pure math, which is distinguished from an engineered product by its abstract nature; at issue with software patents is whether or not software should be considered purely mathematical, or if there is some non-mathematical aspect of software that justifies its patenability. I sit firmly in the "software is math" school of thought, and consider computer programs and algorithms to be abstract mathematical objects; as justification for this view, I point to the vast work on computability theory e.g. the Church-Turing thesis.
Now, if you want to debate whether or not mathematics should be patentable, that is another matter entirely.
We can use English to describe mathematical objects. Like when we describe algorithms in a patent
What is or is not a mathematical object or concept is not defined by "simplicity;" see, for example, the Monster Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group
Computer programs are mathematical objects; go read the work of Church, Turing, Kleene, etc., or for brevity, a book on the theory of computation (I recommend Kozen or Sipser). The "technique" or "method" is the mathematics that is being patented; again, I refer you to the large body of work on computability theory. Mathematics is not limited to formulas and numbers.
The patent is on the technique for compression, not on the program itself
The different being what exactly? What differentiates these:
Add x to y
int f(int x, int y){return x+y;}
One is an English language description of a program, another is a C source code description. Here is another description:
(defun f (x y) (+ x y))
There is a set of numbers that encode this program for a computer with an x86 process, and some other set that encodes the program for a computer with a PowerPC processor. Would you claim that these are all "different programs?" If someone had a patent on addition, would the patent cover some of these representations of the program, but not others?
Microwave radiation is not harmless; you would not be happy if you were being bit with 10kW at 2.4GHz. Good thing 10kW is 100000 times greater than the power output of a typical laptop wifi card.
Wifi devices generally transmit in the low milliwatt range; compare this with the power used by a typical public safety trunked system (800MHz not 2.4GHz):
You are probably being hit with plenty of UHF/microwave radiation when you walk near a police station. Not only that, but your body will absorb more energy at 800MHz than 2.4GHz (the specific absorption rate at 800MHz is higher than at 2.4GHz), so you should be more concerned about your exposure to radiation from public safety systems than from wifi.
Theoretically, by making the possession of child pornography more dangerous, they are reducing the value of it
If that is indeed the strategy -- and I seriously doubt that it is -- then it is a pretty poor strategy. It is becoming increasingly rare for people to pay for child sex abuse imagery*, because of the danger of being tracked should the seller be captured by police. People who produce child sex abuse imagery are increasingly engaging in barter, demanding tit-for-tat exchanges of images and video to reduce the risk that they will be caught, often refusing to accept imagery that they have seen before -- they are actually encouraging the abuse of more children. Thankfully, such people are being caught, but not by the local or state cops with their surveillance vans; they are being caught by international teams of investigators, who are putting in months and even years of work to track down the offenders (see: Dreamboard bust, but even that failed to catch all of the people involved).
There is, of course, a hidden agenda behind the vast overstatement of the number of pedophiles out there. No politician could vote against a bill that promises to enable law enforcement to catch more pedophiles. That has become an excuse for increasing police power again and again, giving the police more and more reasons to arrest people, giving them larger budgets, giving them more equipment, and of course, increasing the prison population. We see paramilitary police units being deployed to arrest people who are suspected of download child sex abuse videos, even when there is no reason to believe that the person is armed (a pattern we see with drug raids). Local police forces are starting to get roving signals intelligence vans, allowing them to sidestep wiretapping requirements (while at the same time pushing for lower barriers to wiretapping). We are drifting away from the goal of catching dangerous pedophiles who abuse children, and towards a very different goal of increasing the power of the police.
As for the war on drugs, it is incredibly naive to think that the police actually want to combat the production of drugs. From the very beginning, the war on drugs was about increasing the power of the police and of course, demonizing black men. The early days of the drug war involved reports of "cocaine niggers," white women wanting to have sex with black men after smoking marijuana, and police departments needing to increase the caliber of their handguns to combat drug-crazed black men. In the late 50s, hippies were added to the list of people that the police could use drug offenses to harass, and by the 80s the drug war was used as a pretext to create paramilitary police forces at every level -- local, state, and federal, as well as to give the police permission to seize assets during drug raids and recycle the proceeds into their own budgets. Laws like the Posse Comitatus Act, which was meant to protect Americans from tyranny, have fallen by the wayside in the name of the war on drugs. Even cops who appear to be dedicated to preventing people from using drugs do not really want the war to be won -- it would be them out of a job.
* If you wonder why I use this term, and not "child pornography," it is because "child pornography" is a poor description of these videos and images. These are images of real children being abused, and we should be very clear about that -- this is not pornography, this is evidence of a crime.
Turing, Church, Kleene, Curry, and many, many other mathematicians who developed the field of computer science have shown otherwise. Computer programs are mathematical "objects," and there is a very broad theory about such objects.
it embodies many assumptions, user interactions, and processes that aren't "just math"
This is kind of like saying, "Applying the quadratic formula is not just math, it embodies other assumptions!"
I'll give an example, lossy compression such as video compression. Determining what data can be removed with minimal perceptual impact isn't "just math".
You are confusing the goal -- a lossy compression function that has some property -- with the program that you use to realize that goal, which is a mathematical object. The computer program that you use to encode a video using some codec is just an algorithm, and the program that decodes that video is also just an algorithm, and we have known that algorithms are mathematical objects for a very long time. The fact that you selected the algorithm that gives you the answers you wanted does not mean that you did something more than math.
Where is the "rigor" in the example above?
First of all, there are different levels of mathematical rigor. See, for example, the debate about this:
That aside, the rigor was in the use of a programming language to describe the algorithm (perhaps less rigorous if you use a language like C, and more rigorous if you are using SKI combinators), and of a technique for checking that the source code described a valid program (using a compiler, or if you wrote the program in machine language, the computer that ran the program, which will presumably enter an error state if you have invalid instructions or instruction sequences). The fact that it is so automated does not make it any less mathematical; one of Turing contributions was to show that some mathematics can be automated. The program as it is stored on your hard drive is a formal description of a mathematical object, and it is not necessarily the only such description.
To claim that a program is more than just math is to claim that numbers themselves are more than just math. Without affixing units to numbers, numbers remain purely abstract. One of the things that engineers do is to assign units to numbers, and those units are what connect numbers to the physical world -- 1 meter, 10 volts, 6 electrons, etc., which give abstract concepts like 1, 6, or 10 a physically meaningful context. Likewise, a computer program is purely abstract (and can even be encoded as numbers without any units); your video codec is just an algorithm for mapping numbers from one set to numbers in some other set. The only reason your video codec is useful at all is that the numbers it computes describe how your video display can produce images, and the codec maps the numbers in a way that is related to the measurements taken by some specialized hardware (a camera).
In the end, though, this is a matter of philosophy, and the Church-Turing thesis is really a philosophical statement.. One can make the argument from the other side using the same statement: since a Turing machine represents computation, and since any program can be compiled into a description of a Turing machine and then be built as a special-purpose computer, a computer program is like a circuit diagram or a building schematic. I find this argument to be less than compelling, however, because algorithms are almost never physically realized (and even less often in an age of FPGAs), and because it is a statement that even very ancient algorithms like the quadratic formula or the Sieve of Erotosthenes are simply descriptions of machines, even though such machines were beyond conception at the ti
Then I guess there are a lot of "fucking sick" people out there, because Hollywood loves dressing teenagers in provocative, sexual outfits. You have probably crossed paths with dozens of "fucking sick" people in the past week under your own definition of the term.
Possession of a picture should not constitute a crime.
Neither should possession of a plant, but we have a long history of imprisoning people and increasing the power of the police over plant possession. The possession of child sex abuse imagery crimes are partially an effort to catch the truly dangerous pedophiles (there are certainly cases where children have been rescued from abusive homes during child pornography raids), but mostly an effort to further increase the power of the police, especially signals intelligence and surveillance power. It is telling that the justice department is trying to distract the public from the question of whether or not the goal is actually the protection of children by pushing the claim that people who look at child abuse imagery are themselves abusing children (as if victims can sense every time someone views such an image).
I am all for catching people who sexually abuse children, but the police tend to go after the low-hanging fruit, the people who stupidly download child sex abuse imagery and who are the least likely to be producing that material or abusing children. There are people out there who have been abusing children for years, and posting images of that abuse, and they take a lot of precautions -- catching those people requires substantial investigative work, large budgets, and often results in small numbers of arrests (thus making it harder for the police to ask for more money and equipment). It is hard to keep the public afraid enough to allow budgets and powers to continue to grow when you take 5 years to arrest less than 100 pedophiles; thus possession has become "abuse," and people are guaranteed to meet at least one pedophile as their go about their daily business.
Children can't legally or emotionally consent to sex; there's no such thing as "voluntary pedophilia."
Certainly at the extremes, but unfortunately there are places where an 18 year old can be accused of pedophilia because he (it is almost always males are the accused) has sex with a 17 year old. Nobody wants to see a grown man who raped a 6 year old walking free, but I think it is a stretch to say that someone is a pedophile if they had sex with someone who was only a few months younger. Unfortunately, attempts to add some sanity to these laws are politically difficult and open politicians up to accusations of not protecting children from pedophiles.
If you claim that software is just math, then all engineering is just math
No, claiming software is math is like claiming that engineering designs are math. The difference is that engineering designs are not useful until a physical system is built based on those designs, while software is useful regardless of how it is implemented. You cannot use the description of a bridge to drive your car over a body of water; you can use a description of a computer program to compute whatever the program computes. A computer program is purely abstract, like a number (in fact, computer programs can be represented as numbers, and can be used even when given in that representation), and computer programs operate on purely abstract things, and output purely abstract things. A computer program cannot build a car, it can only be used to compute how some specialized hardware can build a car.
If you are curious about the mathematical nature of software, I recommend reading any number of theory of computation texts; Sipser's book is widely used in CS curricula, but Kozen's book is also a good illustration. You might also want to read a book about lambda calculus / combinator logic if you are interested in formal ways of describing computer programs.
As I have said elsewhere, I draw the line at abstraction. Software is absolutely abstract; bridges, buildings, microchips, chemical processes, etc. all have to be physically realized in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that there will always been more demand for national currencies than there will be for Bitcoin, and so over the long term we should expect Bitcoin's value to decline. Trying to bet on it being exchangeable for dollars for any period of time is speculation, which gets back to my original point: Bitcoin's value is almost entirely due to speculation.
There's no reason it can't exist as a niche currency
OK, I'll grant that -- Bitcoin might live on as an obscure, niche currency with extremely limited utility. Not even the black market users will stick with it in that case, and perhaps people will realize that there are more effective digital cash systems out there that could be deployed in a way that benefits society (not just the black market).
Even with the above reasoning, Bitcoin can still survive if there are enough situations where no currency is de jure standard and Bitcoin has a considerable advantage. Black market for sure, and gray market might be a good candidate for it.
In which case it would only take a digital currency system that does not suffer from Bitcoin's inherent scalability problem -- the fact that the computational resources needed for Bitcoin grow with the number of Bitcoin transactions, a fact that is inherent in all digital cash systems and that is typically resolved by means of a central issuing authority that can "renew" tokens -- to kill of Bitcoin. If the only advantage Bitcoin has is that it is a digital cash system, it is only a matter of time before it dies and all the people who bought into the system but did not have a chance to cash out have to eat the loss.
Yours is a bleak perspective though
Probably because Bitcoin is a badly designed system. Interesting as a mental exercise, but ultimately doomed. Worse still, Bitcoin has become synonymous with digital cash, which means that better systems have even worse chances of being adopted, especially once Bitcoin fails.
they have already begun by taking the mining out of the default client
This makes the scalability problem even worse, since it forces you to reuse older tokens, which have already grown because of their use in previous transactions. This is not a problem that you can just hack your way around, it is a fundamental limitation of digital cash systems. Note that on the very page you linked to, they attempt to sidestep this problem by claiming that hard drive sizes will grow to accommodate their needs, which I seriously doubt unless Bitcoin remains an obscure payment system.
The black market already holds its own to the deman for national currency and the black market is growing with time - it is very likely that within the next decade or two it may outpace the regulated one. With half the world's population already employed in the black market it is not much of a stretch to think that you don't need a government to back a currency, if the incentives are right for the market to protect it itself.
It is very much a stretch to think that money can exist without government backing. If the black market stopped using national currencies, they would be forced to switch to a currency backed by some other large, powerful organization to enforce payments, and that organization would be a de facto government. Money is only valuable within some enforcement structure, which is the role that a government plays; even when banks issue currency, they rely on governments to enforce debt payments.
And you could say by the same metric that trade in physical goods, whether coins or paper bills have been a 'necessary' component ...until the digital banking started to take over in the 80's or so. Just because something has always been part of the economy does not mean that it is necessary. That is a correlation vs. causation error in thinking.
Except that we still trade in physical goods (and even if all currency were digital cash, you would still trade in physical goods -- you need food, clothing, etc.), and we have had paper transactions managed by banks for centuries (which have simply moved computers, which are more efficient record keeping systems).
At a basic level, credit is necessary in any economy because people with the skills needed to complete a task do not always have the resources needed for that task. A farmer might not have enough money to buy the fertilizer he needs for a particular growing season, a cook might not have the resources needed to start a restaurant, etc. At an even more fundamental level, you might need to work before you are able to pay the soldiers that protect you from a hostile enemy, but those soldiers need to be paid while they are busy protecting you; taxes themselves are a form of debt, and governments cannot function without tax revenue.
The unfortunate thing about Bitcoin is that people have come to associate Bitcoin with digital cash. There are plenty of other digital cash systems that have all of Bitcoin's advantages without the serious disadvantages; those systems use a bank or other token issuing authority to renew tokens that have long transaction chains (thus avoiding the scalability problem) and are easy to back with a national currency, or perhaps to use as a national currency. Anarchists may not like the idea of a bank having power over currency, but that is just how currencies work: some central authority must back the currency. I am personally a big fan of digital cash, since it would solve a lot of the security problems that we see with debit and credit cards, but because of the various crypto battles and patents in the 90s digital cash never did take off.
There's a considerable demographic in the Bitcoin community...who would very much prefer if they could trade it back and forth as an isolated currency
Unless they live outside the jurisdiction of any effective government, they will have to find at least enough of some nation's currency to pay their taxes (which in some nations includes taxes on transactions made using Bitcoin, which cannot themselves be paid using Bitcoin). I sincerely doubt that these users live under such circumstances, and even if they did, they would also have to find a way to generate electricity and connect to the Internet without incurring any costs other than Bitcoin, which is also an unlikely event. Either these people are paying the fees associated with using Bitcoin (energy, bandwidth, property taxes, etc.) using some other currency that they have obtained by some other means (and which will still affect the value of Bitcoin because of its use in paying for Bitcoin infrastructure) or they are going to have to trade their Bitcoins for some other currency at some point.
Aside from some toy examples, Bitcoin is never going to be anything more than a proxy for some other currency. There is no way for Bitcoin to scale (even if we ignore the technical problems with Bitcoin scalability) to anything that even resembles a national economy without some government "backing" it (that is, enforcing the payment of debt using Bitcoin). That is not going to happen, for various reasons, the most prominent being that governments like to be able to control the amount of currency in circulation and Bitcoin makes that impossible.
Useful digital cash systems involve a central issuing authority like a bank or government, that can accept old tokens and produce "fresh" tokens of equal value. Having such a central authority is not a bad thing:
It is a good thing that nobody is obligated to use BItcoin to pay their debts, because:
So there you have it.
Sure there will -- you can grow some marijuana and trade that for Bitcoins. Except that the only reason anyone does such a thing right now is because they want to trade the Bitcoins for their nation's currency.
All Bitcoin exchanges are shit. They're for speculators. Bitcoin as a currency is fine, and it will be fine if every exchange dies off.
Without speculation, Bitcoin is worthless. The only reason anyone has ever accepted Bitcoin as payment for anything is because they believe they can redeem Bitcoin for some other currency later on -- something which there is never any guarantee of (compare to private currencies that are backed by national currencies). This is in stark contrast to national currencies like dollars, which people must have if they intend to pay their taxes (which they must do if they intend to legally own property, hold a job, etc.). Nobody actually needs to use Bitcoin, no governments accept Bitcoin for tax purposes, no banks accept Bitcoin as a repayment on debt, and its technical advantages as a digital cash system are neither unique nor anything close to a justification for its value.
When Bitcoin exchanges die, Bitcoin will die too. If people cannot buy into the system or cash out, the system will come grinding to a halt.
Money is not fiction, it is a mechanism that governments and banks can use. Dollars not valuable simply because people believe they are valuable, they are valuable because the US government requires a large group of people to use dollars (i.e. to pay taxes and other debts). People believe dollars are valuable because all the tax-paying and otherwise indebted citizens around them demand dollars as payment, because they need those dollars if they do not want the government to take their property or freedom. As long as people agree to be governed by the US government, currency issued by the government will have value.
Nobody is required to use Bitcoin, which is why it is so volatile (its value is based entirely on speculation) and will ultimately fail (as people demand dollars and other currencies more than they demand Bitcoin).
Cue the climate change denials in 3...2...1...
On the other hand, China might not care which American corporations they can read the emails of; they might just take whatever they can get. For a targeted attach, this is going to be hard to exploit -- it is like trying to guess one of the primes in an RSA number.
Worse still, it may be the case that some particular software product or setup is causing these keys to be generated; this could make it easier to attack people using that software. Those weak keys might have been generated by a cloud service provider's VM images, or by a particular OS installer or software installation package, or by some common IT practice involving the management of large numbers of systems.
a recipe for creating an engineering product is also abstract. For example, a sequence of steps A, B, C in manufacturing product X is abstract, until it is implemented in some concrete product.
Unless it can be implemented, however, an engineering design is not useful at all. Simulating a car is very much different from having a car, simulating a circuit is very different from having a circuit, etc. Descriptions of engineered systems are not useful (other than as a way to teach engineering students); yet a description of an algorithm is the only thing that you really want. This is where the difference between an engineering design and a software system lies: a description of software is actually more useful than a physically realized version of the software (remember video game cartridges? Now imagine a world where all the programs you use were like that -- circuits that you had to plug in to your monitor, keyboard, and hard drive).
From reading this new paper, what these guys have been able to do is to take a pair of public keys and identify if one or both of the large secret prime numbers is the same between both keys. Am I reading things right, is this what they have found?
Correct.
I would assume that unless you can find (using this new discovery) a public key where one or both of P and Q match a key you already have the private half of, you cant decrypt.
Not correct; if you have two RSA keys with a common prime factor, you can use the GCD to determine what that common prime is (normally, the GCD would be 1, because the two moduli would have no common factors), and then simply divide by that prime to determine both of the secret keys. The keys with common prime factors are effectively worthless, and worse still, someone happening to generate one of the same primes that you generated will leak your secret key to the entire world.
Now, to be fair, DSA and ElGamal have a similar problem when it comes to nonces; see, for example, the Debian bug, the Sony bugy, etc. The real lesson here is that good random number generation is vital to public key cryptography (but we knew that already) and that you should be extra cautious when generating your RSA keys (or when using your DSA and ElGamal keys).
The issue here is not the value of the inputs or outputs, but the abstract nature. We are not supposed to grant patents on pure math, which is distinguished from an engineered product by its abstract nature; at issue with software patents is whether or not software should be considered purely mathematical, or if there is some non-mathematical aspect of software that justifies its patenability. I sit firmly in the "software is math" school of thought, and consider computer programs and algorithms to be abstract mathematical objects; as justification for this view, I point to the vast work on computability theory e.g. the Church-Turing thesis.
Now, if you want to debate whether or not mathematics should be patentable, that is another matter entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group
The patent is on the technique for compression, not on the program itself
The different being what exactly? What differentiates these:
Add x to y
One is an English language description of a program, another is a C source code description. Here is another description:
There is a set of numbers that encode this program for a computer with an x86 process, and some other set that encodes the program for a computer with a PowerPC processor. Would you claim that these are all "different programs?" If someone had a patent on addition, would the patent cover some of these representations of the program, but not others?
Microwave radiation is not harmless; you would not be happy if you were being bit with 10kW at 2.4GHz. Good thing 10kW is 100000 times greater than the power output of a typical laptop wifi card.
Wifi devices generally transmit in the low milliwatt range; compare this with the power used by a typical public safety trunked system (800MHz not 2.4GHz):
http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/gbtrunk.html
http://w8msp.com/Oakland.html
You are probably being hit with plenty of UHF/microwave radiation when you walk near a police station. Not only that, but your body will absorb more energy at 800MHz than 2.4GHz (the specific absorption rate at 800MHz is higher than at 2.4GHz), so you should be more concerned about your exposure to radiation from public safety systems than from wifi.
So machines, like cryptographic processes, are one level of abstraction away from pure mathematics
Except that cryptography is zero levels away from mathematics; cryptography is based on complexity theoretic and probabilistic arguments.
Theoretically, by making the possession of child pornography more dangerous, they are reducing the value of it
If that is indeed the strategy -- and I seriously doubt that it is -- then it is a pretty poor strategy. It is becoming increasingly rare for people to pay for child sex abuse imagery*, because of the danger of being tracked should the seller be captured by police. People who produce child sex abuse imagery are increasingly engaging in barter, demanding tit-for-tat exchanges of images and video to reduce the risk that they will be caught, often refusing to accept imagery that they have seen before -- they are actually encouraging the abuse of more children. Thankfully, such people are being caught, but not by the local or state cops with their surveillance vans; they are being caught by international teams of investigators, who are putting in months and even years of work to track down the offenders (see: Dreamboard bust, but even that failed to catch all of the people involved).
There is, of course, a hidden agenda behind the vast overstatement of the number of pedophiles out there. No politician could vote against a bill that promises to enable law enforcement to catch more pedophiles. That has become an excuse for increasing police power again and again, giving the police more and more reasons to arrest people, giving them larger budgets, giving them more equipment, and of course, increasing the prison population. We see paramilitary police units being deployed to arrest people who are suspected of download child sex abuse videos, even when there is no reason to believe that the person is armed (a pattern we see with drug raids). Local police forces are starting to get roving signals intelligence vans, allowing them to sidestep wiretapping requirements (while at the same time pushing for lower barriers to wiretapping). We are drifting away from the goal of catching dangerous pedophiles who abuse children, and towards a very different goal of increasing the power of the police.
As for the war on drugs, it is incredibly naive to think that the police actually want to combat the production of drugs. From the very beginning, the war on drugs was about increasing the power of the police and of course, demonizing black men. The early days of the drug war involved reports of "cocaine niggers," white women wanting to have sex with black men after smoking marijuana, and police departments needing to increase the caliber of their handguns to combat drug-crazed black men. In the late 50s, hippies were added to the list of people that the police could use drug offenses to harass, and by the 80s the drug war was used as a pretext to create paramilitary police forces at every level -- local, state, and federal, as well as to give the police permission to seize assets during drug raids and recycle the proceeds into their own budgets. Laws like the Posse Comitatus Act, which was meant to protect Americans from tyranny, have fallen by the wayside in the name of the war on drugs. Even cops who appear to be dedicated to preventing people from using drugs do not really want the war to be won -- it would be them out of a job.
* If you wonder why I use this term, and not "child pornography," it is because "child pornography" is a poor description of these videos and images. These are images of real children being abused, and we should be very clear about that -- this is not pornography, this is evidence of a crime.
However, the program is not "just math",
Turing, Church, Kleene, Curry, and many, many other mathematicians who developed the field of computer science have shown otherwise. Computer programs are mathematical "objects," and there is a very broad theory about such objects.
it embodies many assumptions, user interactions, and processes that aren't "just math"
This is kind of like saying, "Applying the quadratic formula is not just math, it embodies other assumptions!"
I'll give an example, lossy compression such as video compression. Determining what data can be removed with minimal perceptual impact isn't "just math".
You are confusing the goal -- a lossy compression function that has some property -- with the program that you use to realize that goal, which is a mathematical object. The computer program that you use to encode a video using some codec is just an algorithm, and the program that decodes that video is also just an algorithm, and we have known that algorithms are mathematical objects for a very long time. The fact that you selected the algorithm that gives you the answers you wanted does not mean that you did something more than math.
Where is the "rigor" in the example above?
First of all, there are different levels of mathematical rigor. See, for example, the debate about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
That aside, the rigor was in the use of a programming language to describe the algorithm (perhaps less rigorous if you use a language like C, and more rigorous if you are using SKI combinators), and of a technique for checking that the source code described a valid program (using a compiler, or if you wrote the program in machine language, the computer that ran the program, which will presumably enter an error state if you have invalid instructions or instruction sequences). The fact that it is so automated does not make it any less mathematical; one of Turing contributions was to show that some mathematics can be automated. The program as it is stored on your hard drive is a formal description of a mathematical object, and it is not necessarily the only such description.
To claim that a program is more than just math is to claim that numbers themselves are more than just math. Without affixing units to numbers, numbers remain purely abstract. One of the things that engineers do is to assign units to numbers, and those units are what connect numbers to the physical world -- 1 meter, 10 volts, 6 electrons, etc., which give abstract concepts like 1, 6, or 10 a physically meaningful context. Likewise, a computer program is purely abstract (and can even be encoded as numbers without any units); your video codec is just an algorithm for mapping numbers from one set to numbers in some other set. The only reason your video codec is useful at all is that the numbers it computes describe how your video display can produce images, and the codec maps the numbers in a way that is related to the measurements taken by some specialized hardware (a camera).
In the end, though, this is a matter of philosophy, and the Church-Turing thesis is really a philosophical statement.. One can make the argument from the other side using the same statement: since a Turing machine represents computation, and since any program can be compiled into a description of a Turing machine and then be built as a special-purpose computer, a computer program is like a circuit diagram or a building schematic. I find this argument to be less than compelling, however, because algorithms are almost never physically realized (and even less often in an age of FPGAs), and because it is a statement that even very ancient algorithms like the quadratic formula or the Sieve of Erotosthenes are simply descriptions of machines, even though such machines were beyond conception at the ti
Then I guess there are a lot of "fucking sick" people out there, because Hollywood loves dressing teenagers in provocative, sexual outfits. You have probably crossed paths with dozens of "fucking sick" people in the past week under your own definition of the term.
Possession of a picture should not constitute a crime.
Neither should possession of a plant, but we have a long history of imprisoning people and increasing the power of the police over plant possession. The possession of child sex abuse imagery crimes are partially an effort to catch the truly dangerous pedophiles (there are certainly cases where children have been rescued from abusive homes during child pornography raids), but mostly an effort to further increase the power of the police, especially signals intelligence and surveillance power. It is telling that the justice department is trying to distract the public from the question of whether or not the goal is actually the protection of children by pushing the claim that people who look at child abuse imagery are themselves abusing children (as if victims can sense every time someone views such an image).
I am all for catching people who sexually abuse children, but the police tend to go after the low-hanging fruit, the people who stupidly download child sex abuse imagery and who are the least likely to be producing that material or abusing children. There are people out there who have been abusing children for years, and posting images of that abuse, and they take a lot of precautions -- catching those people requires substantial investigative work, large budgets, and often results in small numbers of arrests (thus making it harder for the police to ask for more money and equipment). It is hard to keep the public afraid enough to allow budgets and powers to continue to grow when you take 5 years to arrest less than 100 pedophiles; thus possession has become "abuse," and people are guaranteed to meet at least one pedophile as their go about their daily business.
Children can't legally or emotionally consent to sex; there's no such thing as "voluntary pedophilia."
Certainly at the extremes, but unfortunately there are places where an 18 year old can be accused of pedophilia because he (it is almost always males are the accused) has sex with a 17 year old. Nobody wants to see a grown man who raped a 6 year old walking free, but I think it is a stretch to say that someone is a pedophile if they had sex with someone who was only a few months younger. Unfortunately, attempts to add some sanity to these laws are politically difficult and open politicians up to accusations of not protecting children from pedophiles.
Software isn't just math
Oh yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-turing_thesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_calculus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog
If you claim that software is just math, then all engineering is just math
No, claiming software is math is like claiming that engineering designs are math. The difference is that engineering designs are not useful until a physical system is built based on those designs, while software is useful regardless of how it is implemented. You cannot use the description of a bridge to drive your car over a body of water; you can use a description of a computer program to compute whatever the program computes. A computer program is purely abstract, like a number (in fact, computer programs can be represented as numbers, and can be used even when given in that representation), and computer programs operate on purely abstract things, and output purely abstract things. A computer program cannot build a car, it can only be used to compute how some specialized hardware can build a car.
If you are curious about the mathematical nature of software, I recommend reading any number of theory of computation texts; Sipser's book is widely used in CS curricula, but Kozen's book is also a good illustration. You might also want to read a book about lambda calculus / combinator logic if you are interested in formal ways of describing computer programs.
As I have said elsewhere, I draw the line at abstraction. Software is absolutely abstract; bridges, buildings, microchips, chemical processes, etc. all have to be physically realized in some way.