341–350 of 395 posts
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This is either some of the best satire in the world or I still don't get it. Probably the latter.
Don’t discount the former. Or performance art. Or a test for next season’s plot from Pied Piper or Hooli. Are we not entertained?
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A user accepting these "verifies" them by assuming that two properties hold if they connect over NFC or via pogo pins to the "gold elements", send a challenge over this connection, and receive in response the challenge signed with a public key associated with locked Kong tokens. 1. the relevant private key is known to only a Kong note's secure element. this is (hopefully) enforced by the secure element's, uh, securit…
Are there any solutions to the relay attack you describe? Perhaps by having the secure element "lock" and "unlock" each time the note changes hands, so that an attacker who uses a a relay will still have his note locked in a way that makes it useless unless he gives it to the recipient to unlock?
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You could make this same criticism of cash, though. It's not a usability regression, they just both have the same flaw. People pass off counterfeit currency as real all the time.
Sure but cash isn’t affected by water, freezing, bending, pressure, moderate temperatures above whatever the 70C limit is on these ICs, static electricity, ionizing radiation and microwaves. People don’t pass off counterfeit currency as real all the time either, that’s a false lead. Currently 0.01% of currency is fake and it’s actively sought out and removed from circulation [1]. That’s almost guaranteed way less tha…
And if your physical banknotes do somehow get damaged e.g. by fire or by being chewed by a pet, there is a decent chance you'll still be able to get them exchanged, because there are government-backed institutions there to help you such as the Bank of England[0] or the US Dept of Treasury Bureau of Engraving and Printing[1].
In the absence of a Central Bank of Kong to perform this function, the Kong people could make their new physical currency more robust by putting their fancy chips and whatnot inside some discs made of a metal that was resistant to corrosion and oxidation and had a very high melting point. Perhaps also using a rare metal with high economic value, preferably with a standardized weight and purity, so it could also better act as a store of value and be more difficult to counterfeit. At that point you could also take out the fancy chips and whatnot in order to improve reliablility, usability etc.
[0] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/damaged-and-contam...
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Just a bit more expensive than the higher end notes produced by Switzerland/Australia and less expensive than limited edition postage stamps. We looked at existing hardware wallets like trezor and ledger and realized we could create something like this for 1/20th the price. Once we realized the numbers we were playing with we ran with it. Conceptually, I prefer validating something with a cryptographic signing operat…
OK, but how much is that? I don't see the point in being vague about it.
It's utterly impossible to sustain, it's highly likely that the physical cost could be higher than the face value
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The point of this I thought is to unify the virtual system with a physical product, in the pretty cash. So it isn’t just the chip now, is it? Otherwise why not just... use a hardware wallet and use bitcoin ? I do agree that people can’t picture or visualize in their mind a “bitcoin”, and so this solves that part. But then you’re left with the, how do people print this tangible pretty currency part.
The point is physical cash is really important to a functioning society. Cryptocurrencies are turning out to be really important but lack a physical cash instrument. Kong marries the two. Kong accomplishes that by minimizing trust down to the chip level - as opposed to the firmware or application level - so we can make these things trustlessly and cost effectively. Something like a Trezor is too expensive and dear to…
Not really. There's a couple northern european economies that are almost entirely cashless.
Hi folks, I’m one of the contributors at Kong — https://kong.cash/ . Kong is a physical cryptocurrency that looks, feels and works like traditional cash. You can think of it as an ultra-secure, time locked cryptocurrency wallet with a fixed face value — no one can access the token except for the holder of the note after a period of several years. It consists of a secure element and NFC chips mounted on a flexible PCB…
Are you in a non extradition treaty country? This could be a relevant question for you soon enough
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It's a zero coupon bearer bond, that's all. With some very elaborate anti forgery. Nothing wrong with an organization printing bonds, it's just that these aren't a debt but represent locked up economically inactive etherum.
This might sway me if they didn't repeatedly refer to it as "cash" on their website.
Rarely do users of cash care about the property of it being payable on demand by the issuer (conventionally a central bank), only the property that it be practical for physical commerce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A user accepting these "verifies" them by assuming that two properties hold if they connect over NFC or via pogo pins to the "gold elements", send a challenge over this connection, and receive in response the challenge signed with a public key associated with locked Kong tokens. 1. the relevant private key is known to only a Kong note's secure element. this is (hopefully) enforced by the secure element's, uh, securit…
Are there any solutions to the relay attack you describe? Perhaps by having the secure element "lock" and "unlock" each time the note changes hands, so that an attacker who uses a a relay will still have his note locked in a way that makes it useless unless he gives it to the recipient to unlock?