Post for: #bitcoin (21 Posts)

Someone turned this ATM into a "Bitcoin ATM" with a sticker. Adoption level: creative.

A little rain and the stock ticker outside of the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange goes crazy...
Remind me why markets need buildings?

I've been reading some of the early correspondence between Satoshi Nakamoto and famed cryptographers, right around the time of the publication of the Bitcoin white paper and pre-release of the client software, and it's just epic.

I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper. I think I will be able to release the code sooner than I could write a detailed spec. You're already right about most of your assumptions where you filled in the blanks. »

Replying to the claim "You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography":

Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. »

Because for cutting off the heads of pure P2P networks, they just don't have the technology.

On chargebacks:

Instantant [sic] non-repudiability is not a feature, but it's still much faster than existing systems. Paper cheques can bounce up to a week or two later. Credit card transactions can be contested up to 60 to 180 days later. Bitcoin transactions can be sufficiently irreversible in an hour or two. »

And my favorite...

I'm better with code than with words though. »

Brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

• Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography

I was reminded of this quote, due to the discussions triggered by the Bitcoin private key database troll website about the feasibility of brute-force searching for the private key of a Bitcoin address.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

• Albert Allen Bartlett

A reddit user made some calculations:

So, if you could use the entire planet as a hard drive, storing 1 byte per atom, using stars as fuel, and cycling through 1 trillion keys per second, you'd need 37 octillion Earths to store it, and 237 billion suns to power the device capable of doing it, all of which would take you 3.6717 octodecillion years.

• PSBlake (reddit)

Bitcoin private key database - directory.io

Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions. (via Ars Technica)

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

• Robert Coveyou, Studies in Applied Mathematics, III (1970)