241–250 of 428 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't you effectively trusting that service not to front run you?
Yes, the only other way is to mine it yourself. They are a public company that run their own miners if it makes you feel any better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's some kind of EC/DSA scheme, isn't it? Then from the private key you can indeed get the public key.
Is this true? from an ECDSA private key you could derive many possible public keys? asking for a friend
The basic idea is you pick one private key that's a sequence of 256 bits or so, call this k. When you need a keypair, you compute H(k, tag) to get another bitstring, then turn that into an ECDSA private key (minding the bear traps here) and that then has a single public key.
For example in U2F, the key derivation is H(k, domain, ...) where k is the secret baked into the USB token, domain is the domain you're logging in to (this is the part that protects against phishing, among other things) and further protocol-specific information.
Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or some other number-theoretic advance that is significantly below exponential time on the particular type of field or curve being used. The reason that we use elliptic curves these days, or if we must then something like 8k bit keys to get 128 bits of security over finite fields, is that for the old Z^*_q/Z_p setup, such a faster algorithm exists (index calculus). Someone could in theory find a better calculus that…
Do you have a personal book recommendation on the group and/or number theory of this type of cryptography?
You can get a brief introduction at https://soatok.blog/2020/04/26/a-furrys-guide-to-digital-sig... (your own choice if you want that open in a tab at work or not, but there's nothing NSFW in the usual sense in there), and then read the details of each scheme in the RFCs. Some of the RFCs even talk about security implications.
"djb" as he is known in the crypto world has a good paper at https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1265 , it's 68 pages so "almost a book". He also has a lot of resources on his page https://cr.yp.to . Be aware that he is sometimes ... controversial (not racist or anything, just has strong opinions on FIPS and the NSA and has actually taken the US government to court in the past over this). He's the author of Curve25519.
Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…
So exponential increase in difficulty, linear increase in reward. Unless the price goes exponential too! (Which was the case for a while)
Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…
Am I correct in assuming that beyond a certain point, this is basically an existence proof for somebody having a quantum-supreme solution to Shor's Algorithm? "Here's $400,000 sitting on the table, hope nobody takes it" which triggers an alarm telling us to replace all our old prequantum cryptography.
(disclaimer, I don't know statistics, cryptography, bitcoin or chances)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…
This is another useful example to have handy against the canard: "You're only skeptical of cryptocurrencies/blockchain because you haven't learned enough about how they work." I believe the correlation is the other way around... at least once you get past some early local maxima near "people who don't understand how money can be in a computer." P.S.: To digress (rant) a bit: The linchpin is whether your system needs…
The only reason we're still talking about BTC is bag-holders. It's vastly technologically inferior on every metric.
Talking about BTC's failures as if they exemplify cryptocurrency is just like attacking solar panels on the basis of whale oil's flaws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard about Target's tracking from reputable sources, but never of them refusing to take cash, do you have a reputable source for that?
yes, in California, City of Albany, Target store near San Francisco, refused to take cash at the checkout not long ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this isn't a normal key. It's a key with extremely reduced entropy for the sake of the puzzle. Most of the private key is already known and is in fact all zero. So this would not be possible with a normal Bitcoin transaction with regular entropy.
But I guess this means that all Bitcoin transactions have half the entropy we think they do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vitalik didn't rollback the chain. The entire community agreed that it was the correct thing to do and did it. Thats how consensus mechanisims work. This was easier then because the community was tiny. It would be impossible now. The proof of this is that some people didn't agree with undoing that transaction. They stayed on the old chain, which is now worthless. This is such a boring and widely known story now, but…
I was going to write a more indirect response by way of analogy, but it got too unwieldy. TL;DR: I was predisposed to taking the position you are advocating for, but this argument is incredibly weak while demonstrating the problem, to the point it made me wonder about my own priors. Shape-shifts from "this was totally fine and normal" to "but totally couldn't do it today" to "and guess what the ppl who didn't want to…