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Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

blog.perfmode.com

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Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#41

Post by adventured »

perfmode wrote: post #40
adventured wrote: post #34

There are financial holdings worth 100+ times that bitcoin wallet. Likely protected by a lot less than 100 times the security of a 256 bit key. Apple's hedge fund, Braeburn Capital, likely qualifies. It's arguably the largest hedge fund in the world. Gain access to their network and you could wreak serious financial havoc.

It is probably the case that there are multiple cryptographically-secured security layers standing between an anonymous internet user and the innermost layer of such a system.

I'm assuming you wouldn't try to go after their network from an anonymous Internet user.

Rather, stuxnet comes to mind. We're talking about $150 billion after all.

Of course the other issue is, I'm betting they're holding a lot of short term government securities. It simply isn't plausible to steal $70 billion worth of short term US paper and do anything with it.

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#43

Post by jorgem »

downer94 wrote: post #37
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the gold at Fort Knox already off the market? Would destroying it really alter the value of existent non-Knox gold that much? How much?

Well, what if you just ransom it? Targeting it is hardly destructive.

How do you threaten to destroy gold?

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#46

Post by jere »

jsharpe wrote: post #39
jere wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Omniscient? Well, I'm not very creative, but you should be able to get off at least half a dozen lottery picks in that.

That's a good point. You'd have to restrict to information available to someone at the current time, and not based on future randomness (like winning lottery numbers). Otherwise, you could make (effectively) unbounded money by just specifying the stock symbol of a company that gains the most in value in the next year.

Well, yes. I see your original point... it makes sense if you look at it from a perspective of communicating the information rather than a security perspective, which is what I was focusing on. Of course, that all assumes that the receiver knows a priori they are receiving a key and what the key corresponds to. And assuming you wanted to set something like that up, there are a lot more dense ways to go about it. It reminds me of this: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/we-went-looking...

In other words, bury massive inheritance in the desert. Issue a list of 1,000,000 GPS coordinates. Then you only need 10 bits.

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#47

Post by hrjet »

chiph wrote: post #29
hrjet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? Can the "difficulty" level in hashing ever reach the bit-length of the key?

Technically, I don't know, as I don't personally understand the code behind the mining and what the difficulty would be like to mine the very last bitcoin. But from a social aspect, cracking that key would be like hitting one of the multi-state lotteries. And people continue to play them all the time, despite the astronomical odds against their winning.

Thinking about this a bit more, if it ever becomes reasonable to co-operatively crack a key, it could only be a good thing for bitcoin economy.

1. If the owner of the wallet still has access to it, they can easily transfer the amount to smaller wallets, and reduce their risk.

2. If the owner has lost access, it is good for the community to recover the lost coins.

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#48

Post by [deleted] »

clarkm wrote: post #23
whatshisface wrote: post #2

Considering that anyone trying to sell that much bitcoin at once would pretty much crash the currency, how much is it really worth? Perhaps some kind of revolutionary mathematical fact could be worth even more? This is a very interesting question. EDIT: A lot of people responding to me seem to be trying to contradict my argument by pointing out that if it was true, it would be true for almost everything. I don't get…

That argument proves too much [1]. The same can be said for almost all stock, e.g. Bill Gates could sell of his shares of Microsoft and crash the stock price. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

[deleted]

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#49

Post by downer94 »

jorgem wrote: post #43
downer94 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what if you just ransom it? Targeting it is hardly destructive.

How do you threaten to destroy gold?

Oh, I dunno, maybe by promising to vaporize it with multiple thermonuclear warheads? I mean, I did contrast the idea with an a attack involving a hypothetical Dyson sphere...

Re: Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?

#50

Post by joezydeco »

downer94 wrote: post #49
jorgem wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you threaten to destroy gold?

Oh, I dunno, maybe by promising to vaporize it with multiple thermonuclear warheads? I mean, I did contrast the idea with an a attack involving a hypothetical Dyson sphere...

It's not a bad idea. In fact, I found a how-to video.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0058150/

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