Quote:
"Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second; the best bitcoin network might be able to process seven per second."
Bitcoin Cash can do 25 tx/second.
With 8GB blocks that is 25k/sec
MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
251–258 of 258 posts
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#252I think this is going in the right direction. You take a bunch of tamper-proof hardware devices from different manufacturers and then model attack costs to compromise them as part of a proof-of-stake scheme. Now you can build consensus algorithms on top of them that are highly secure and scalable compared to anything that exists today. I'm not convinced that Stellar consensus here is the right algorithm for doing thi…
You know it was hard enough for PayTV smart card developers to keep transistor level reverse engineers from getting inside their chips, and all that was at stake then was $35 content subscriptions. I can't imagine how putting personal banking inside SGX will fare. Or, I acknowledge I am probably missing something. Am i?
you're missing that the protections SGX offers will only be one layer of the security model
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument would be stronger if you didn’t resort to epithets. Bitcoin was designed to be as decentralised as possible. It turns out this has serious downsides and it’s difficult to pursue the sort of financial revolution it aspires to without social revolution. This currency chooses different trade-offs which the creators believe will make it more popular because most people don’t need or want trustless transacti…
> Your argument would be stronger if you didn’t resort to epithets. No, an argument is strong or weak regardless of whether you like the words used to express it.
The argument would be stronger in the sense that it would be more persuasive. Which if your goal is to convince people is a highly relevant metric of strength to use.
As disappointing as it might be pure logic is rarely enough in the real world.
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin and other crypto coins are a neat idea until their underlying cryptographic primitives are broken. Then they will immediately loose all of their value. Every cryptosystem of the past has been broken at some time.
Indeed. The coin is only as strong as it's cryptography, and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken. Until that happens, there's still money to be made!
> and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken
Not all ciphers... 3DES and GOST have no practical breaks after 40 years of cryptanalysis (all attacks have > 2^100 time or memory complexity)
Any secure modern 256 bit symmetric primitive is likely safe from large quantum computers.
What will continue to be be broken are encryption protocols and systems that misuse modern secure 256-bit primitives. So we will continue to see things like the BEAST attack because non-cryptographers continue to invent their own encryption protocols with alarming frequency.
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#255Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your argument would be stronger if you didn’t resort to epithets. No, an argument is strong or weak regardless of whether you like the words used to express it.
The argument would be stronger in the sense that it would be more persuasive. Which if your goal is to convince people is a highly relevant metric of strength to use. As disappointing as it might be pure logic is rarely enough in the real world.
You state the obvious. The point is to encourage rational thinking and discourage emotional reaction. One person at a time.
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know it was hard enough for PayTV smart card developers to keep transistor level reverse engineers from getting inside their chips, and all that was at stake then was $35 content subscriptions. I can't imagine how putting personal banking inside SGX will fare. Or, I acknowledge I am probably missing something. Am i?
It wasn't that hard and the stakes were much higher than that. Individual subscriptions could be much more, but the entire black market of glitching units was an industry worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Ultimately DirecTV was able to kill pay TV hacking by simply introducing a new generation of cards that were better protected, the P4 series iirc. Other pay TV firms invested less and were mostly undermine…
Tarnovsky wasn't the only key. There was also a single minded team of former intelligence investigators spread around the world coercing and infiltrating, on top of a smartcard dev team packed with most of moscows mathematics prize winners, in addition to another red team in haifa with their own tarnovsky's. I speak from first hand knowledge because in my younger and more naive years I used to worked with them.
Still, the analogy applies because the stakes with a cryptocurrency that depends on transistor security become a much more interesting target then the, now boring++, paytv market. It should not be assumed that any secrets will stay inside of that secure enclave, at all.
++it's boring to hack paytv because streaming, downloads and card sharing removed a large bulk share of the need
Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read that like: "a stone wheel ? man it's not revolutionary at all. It's heavy. And hard to make. It's not practical and currently unusable for real purposes." Said by a guy you just witness the historical invention of the wheel.
point 1: The wheel was, in fact, one of the first instances of a centralized structure replacing an inefficieint distributed structure. The central "hub" of a wheel bears the load and the "edge condition" is the substantially reduced "rolling friction". This is in contrast to ye old "distributed load" way of a zillion poor slaves pulling a load. So as far as the "wheel" goes, VISA is a chariot, and Bitcoin is an army…
I couldn't not read your post without hearing your every word dripping with seething anger and disappointment. While your post contains information that has lots of merit, I can't help but see the person that typed this reply as a Big Money VP or someone that's either lost a bunch of money "investing" in crypto, or really fucking pissed they didn't hold onto their Bitcoin. But just to preemptively defuse a reply, here's a funny story: I started mining Bitcoin really early, back when CPU mining was the only thing to do. I ended up selling them (a couple thousand) in January of 2012 to put the down payment on my car.