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94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

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Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be a bit more specific, the ASIC is a computation built in hardware. It can do that computation and that computation alone. The algorithm in Bitcoin does absolutely nothing useful -- you are just hashing a random number and seeing if the result is below a certain value. Since you can't change the computation on the ASIC, it's absolutely useless for anything except mining bitcoins.

Maybe this is dumb/naive, but I've wondered for quite a while - what if you take the latest deep learning/AI techniques and try to train a system to predict the approximate size of the hash from the input number? Has anyone seriously tried and failed?

If you could do it, you'd be famous for more than BTC. It would mean that you could factor numbers in polynomial time. Long story short, calculating the hash for BTC is intended to be a non-polynomial problem. If you can find a method (any method) that will reduce the search space of the answer such that you can calculate it in polynomial time, then you have proved that NP=P (If you can find a way to solve any non-polynomial-time-hard problem in polynomial time, then it means that all NP hard problems can be solved in P time). This would completely break all current encryption.

Most people think that this is impossible, but it has not been proven yet. Unless you had some reason for believing the technique would work, it's probably not worth the effort to try.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the mean a single address, which contains all the coins (94k in this case)

That's what I figured. Weird to call it a coin. There are no coins in bitcoin.

Coins are just the metric used to quantify the amount on an address.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don’t understand how bitcoin works if you have to ask this question.

To be fair, people[1] have raised the question of whether bitcoin is manipulated by people who have printed other types of currency without limit, which implies practically nobody understands how bitcoin works. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066

That’s like manipulating value of USD by printing more Euros. Sure it has effect because economies are interrelated by it can’t be sustained - Euro will be worth nothing eventually.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don’t understand how bitcoin works if you have to ask this question.

To be fair, people[1] have raised the question of whether bitcoin is manipulated by people who have printed other types of currency without limit, which implies practically nobody understands how bitcoin works. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066

Also Tether is special case - it’s not unrelated altcoin, it’s supposedly stablecoin bound to BTC.

“Supposedly” because no proper audit of tether assets and liabilities was done and there is little transparency.

Counterargument is that if tether is insolvent, it would affect Bitcoin but only to some degree.

Here’s the logic: if tether was printed without backing to buy and prop up price of bitcoin then somewhere somebody is sitting on a pile of USDT which they will want to get rid of. You can get rid of USDT by asking tether to buy them back from you for USD or you can trade them on the market for BTC. Assuming tether goes dark USDT owners will be forced to sell USDT at discount creating even more buy pressure for BTC. The whole thing will be a huge debacle and incur some damage to BTC but ultimately it’ll be perceived like one more exchange scams - not your keys not your Bitcoin, trusting that USDT can keep USD parity is purely on you.

Bottom line is - people are being manipulated, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin will continue to live up to its promise - distributed open ledger and transaction platform, solving consensus problem via proof of work and there will only ever be 21 million of them.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be a bit more specific, the ASIC is a computation built in hardware. It can do that computation and that computation alone. The algorithm in Bitcoin does absolutely nothing useful -- you are just hashing a random number and seeing if the result is below a certain value. Since you can't change the computation on the ASIC, it's absolutely useless for anything except mining bitcoins.

Maybe this is dumb/naive, but I've wondered for quite a while - what if you take the latest deep learning/AI techniques and try to train a system to predict the approximate size of the hash from the input number? Has anyone seriously tried and failed?

A different angle from the sibling comment's: the hash functions used here are meant to approximate pseudorandom functions, which are functions that, while deterministic, literally have no structure at all relating their inputs to their outputs in any way.

Hash functions used in the real world haven't been proven to have this property (and there are various theoretical limits on how readily they could be proven to have it, and maybe on the extent to which they could actually have it), but in order to be widely adopted, a hash function has to pass every available statistical test for approximating pseudorandomness, and also has to resist mathematical analysis aimed at finding useful structure. That means that ordinary human intelligences fail to find a practical recipe for predicting properties of the output from properties of the input.

In the same way, we would expect that deep learning systems fail to find such recipes too.

On the other hand, it's not absolutely impossible that there are some kinds of regularities that a deep learning system might discover. If so, they would be considered very serious flaws in the hash function in question. But deployed cryptographic primitives have sometimes had problems like this. The best example that I know of is the RC4 cipher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4#Security

where there have been a series of statistical biases (which are often forms of correlation between input and output, which should not exist if RC4 approximated pseudorandomness well). Some of these were apparently discovered experimentally by researchers with some kind of hypothesis testing tools, as opposed to based on theoretical abstract reasoning about the mathematics of RC4. This makes me think that some kinds of deep learning systems might also have been able to discover those correlations, although I'm not sure that they would have been the most efficient methods for doing so. (An interesting test might be to try to use deep learning to find new correlations in RC4 that aren't yet known -- which seems plausible since researchers have repeatedly found new ones over time.)

I think there are interesting problems about what kinds of correlations and structures deep learning systems can or can't learn efficiently, and whether those are the kinds of correlations and structures that are likely to exist as genuine flaws within deployed hash functions. I definitely don't know enough about the mathematics of deep learning to appreciate how to begin answering this question; I only know that if it turned out to be useful in some case, it would mean that the application of human intelligence and existing statistical tools to assessing hash functions' security had dramatically fallen down on the job.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is dumb/naive, but I've wondered for quite a while - what if you take the latest deep learning/AI techniques and try to train a system to predict the approximate size of the hash from the input number? Has anyone seriously tried and failed?

If you could do it, you'd be famous for more than BTC. It would mean that you could factor numbers in polynomial time. Long story short, calculating the hash for BTC is intended to be a non-polynomial problem. If you can find a method (any method) that will reduce the search space of the answer such that you can calculate it in polynomial time, then you have proved that NP=P (If you can find a way to solve any non-po…

One minor correction to this (although I agree with you conceptually) is that there are no formal security proofs of the complexity class of hash function attacks for actually-existing hash functions. So there is no guarantee that the most efficient way to break a hash function security property is a generalizable attack on NP problems! It might just be that the specific hash function is weak in a previously unknown way.

A sort-of precedent for that kind of problem which I mentioned in my sibling comment is the correlation weaknesses in RC4. While they're not the most powerful possible break of RC4, by any means, they are unanticipated flaws in the structure of RC4 specifically, and they might well have been discovered by software tools that can't solve NP problems in general. It seems to me that we don't have security proofs for symmetric cryptography at all, including for block cipher security properties as well as hash function security properties, and so while your observation is totally right in general, in any specific case it might just turn out that the cryptographic primitive we were using was weak in an unanticipated way that's specific to that class of functions.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_oracle (although reading that article reminds me of how much I don't understand about this topic)!

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My blockchain might be a little rusty, but is it possible to tell the order in which a coin was mined (vs the total) from the information in the chain? If so, should be possible to find satoshi coins relatively easily, no?

Bitcoin doesn’t really work like that, a “coin” is just a value tied to an address, so individual coins are never transferred. What you can do is see all the incoming transactions to an address to identify which addresses received the earliest mined coins.

Good point. Is there a way to see when an address was created?

To date the opening of the account?

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#730
post #235
post #4

By “unknown”, does that mean that none of the source addresses that collectively sent the sum to one address did not have previous transactions from sources that were known? I rather doubt it, unless the sources were mining wallets (which would show up as coin bases). On my phone I’m not going to research it :)

> On my phone I’m not going to research it :) You don't have to be happy about being unable to do like a single click. I agree the headline was confusingly written but happily stating that you're not going to put any effort in whatsoever... I think that's why you are/were being downvoted, not for the question.

I read the article. I also looked at the transaction. But the transaction was made up of maybe two dozen input addresses, and I didn't feel like walking backwards through each of those on my phone.

My question was, has nobody walked them all back to a known address? I find it hard to believe that one of those inputs wasn't downstream of some transactions from a known address.

It's not necessary for me to explain this here, and you were being helpful to me; I'm just clarifying what my intent was with that apparently misleading? statement was.

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