Great story and impressive work at Pyrofex. Can you share your perspective on the crypto industry right now?
How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
151–160 of 209 posts
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#152NEARProtocol.com is hiring. Please have a look. https://nearprotocol.com/careers/#openings and I can connect you with our recruiting team. Thanks :)
Looking, thanks!
You are smart beyond my comprehension. Your article was amazing.
Although blockchain technology fits your skillset, I hope you will choose to do something [actually|more] worthwhile to our societies.
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#153The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.
(It was probably a lot more than that)
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
One can exercise motivation outside of work.
Why be unhappy for 8+ hours a day? Life is short enough as it is, sacrificing 1/4 of it seems rather silly to me unless you have to.
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#155The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did". Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the sta…
>Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.
This is essentially the Nuremburg Defense, but it's "just following money" rather than "just following orders".
Unless we reach some magical Utopia, we will always have the choice between making money through ethical or unethical means, with the former being beneficial to society, and latter being more lucrative to the individual.
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#156Not only are the cryptography skills of Mr. Mike Stay is obviously impressive, his presentation of things which happened 20 years ago in a vivid yet subtle manner seems extraordinary to me. Especially since, I can't remember what I did 2 weeks back to write in my blog. Can you give us the secret of your documentation/notes workflow Mr. Mike (@metaweta)? Please don't say that you recalled from your memory!
I kept a Cryptonomicon!
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#157Great story and impressive work at Pyrofex. Can you share your perspective on the crypto industry right now?
There's no way that the AccessData job I had would exist today. Most services are online, with data encrypted in transit and stored in the cloud. TLS security has improved dramatically over the last decade in response to attacks like BEAST and BREACH and CRIME and POODLE. Google drops (? is going to drop?) your SEO ranking if you don't have proper certs installed. Nowadays, it's rare to find an attack on the connection from the browser to the server. Instead, it's either malware on the client or hacking into the servers, where the operators have terrible security practices like storing data unencrypted at rest.
The field of cryptography has grown tremendously, and there's still a lot of research being done. There have been many competitions for developing strong cryptographic primitives. There's a lot of work being done on zero knowledge proofs and verifiable computation. Cryptocurrency has encouraged lots of bright young minds to get involved.
One thing we learned from the Snowden revelations is that crypto works where it's applied, so every little bit of crypto helps. Run a Tor node if you can.
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#158Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#159I kept expecting to read that the password on the zip file turned out to be “password123” or something like that.
I want to know the password too. If it was machine generated looking at that algo might have been useful.
Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
#160How off was the 100k compute time estimation?
I think he ended up only spending around $5-10K on compute. I'd have to check with Nash.