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Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#41

Post by dougk16 »

malgorithms wrote: post #27

I'd be curious if people on HN would want a zero knowledge survey and voting system inside Keybase, and if so, what would it look like? The background: we talk about it sometimes as a solution to a real problem: in certain teams and workplaces, people can be afraid to give honest feedback (who dares to submit an "anonymous" survey to HR?), but Keybase may be in a unique position to let people in a group give written…

I made something that sounds similar to the kinds of ideas you're throwing out: https://aytwit.com/thoughter

You can read the basic protocol here: https://aytwit.com/about#technical_details__thoughter_gist

It would be cool to see something like that in Keybase. Feel free to steal the idea. :)

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#44

Post by Callmenorm »

mr_puzzled wrote: post #10

Has Keybase lost it's way? I thought they were onto something cool and maybe could explore an enterprise play with private chats, filesharing and git for teams or something like that. Basically make money by selling to teams. But Keybase seems to have stagnated, existing apps are still quite buggy, not enough new developments recently. The facepalm moment for me was when they announced they were supported by the Stel…

I stopped using keybase because it just takes too long to open up the app on keybase and send message on my phone. the desktop client is great, but it's just too slow on mobile.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#45

Post by floren »

Callmenorm wrote: post #44
mr_puzzled wrote: post #10

Has Keybase lost it's way? I thought they were onto something cool and maybe could explore an enterprise play with private chats, filesharing and git for teams or something like that. Basically make money by selling to teams. But Keybase seems to have stagnated, existing apps are still quite buggy, not enough new developments recently. The facepalm moment for me was when they announced they were supported by the Stel…

I stopped using keybase because it just takes too long to open up the app on keybase and send message on my phone. the desktop client is great, but it's just too slow on mobile.

I wanted to make a more light-weight chat client for desktop but unfortunately their Go library documentation was completely impenetrable as of ~6 months ago.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#46

Post by oh_sigh »

Is this a problem with commitment schemes?

I want a heads to come up. I add a couple of hacked members to the group, so there are 3 honest members, and lets say 3 coordinated dishonest members.

Everyone shares their commitment hash, and the dishonest members share their actual commitments amongst themselves. Once everyone has the commitment hashes, the 3 honest members broadcast their commitment. The three dishonest members now have everyone's commitments, but honest members only have other honest member commitments. Dishonest members compute the ultimate value - if it turns up heads, then they just share their commitments with everyone, and the final answer is heads.

If it turns up tails, then the dishonest members compute possible permutations of various dishonest members dropping out and never sending their commitments. So maybe if dishonest member 1 drops out, the resultant value from just the group of 5 would be heads. So dishonest member 2 and 3 share their commitments and dishonest member 1 goes offline.

So, this system will work when it is composed of only people you trust, but will not work when it may be composed of people you don't trust. And if you trust everyone in it, why go through this process in the first place? And if you decide that when someone drops out and doesn't share their commitment, you just have to rerun the algorithm, then you have just given a very easy way to give the dishonest people a way to spike your coin flipper, so that no one can ever get a value out of it, or the dishonest members can just keep dropping out until they encounter a round where the final value is determined to be heads.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#47

Post by opnitro »

malgorithms wrote: post #27

I'd be curious if people on HN would want a zero knowledge survey and voting system inside Keybase, and if so, what would it look like? The background: we talk about it sometimes as a solution to a real problem: in certain teams and workplaces, people can be afraid to give honest feedback (who dares to submit an "anonymous" survey to HR?), but Keybase may be in a unique position to let people in a group give written…

I worry this ends up being a technical solution to what is ultimately a social problem. If the problem is that people feel threatened submitted feedback at their workplace, the issue is the structure of the workplace.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#48

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

freedomben wrote: post #20
guessmyname wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of NSFW stuff in Keybase… Since the end of January 2019 I’ve started to notice more and more profiles with suggestive pictures of underage humans and anime characters. I almost never log into my Keybase account, but frequently check my profile to see “friend” recommendations, then I log in and follow people who I think are interesting, mostly tech influencers. But since January-February I randomly get recomm…

Yep, this is the latest incarnation of the evergreen philosophical problem regarding technology: capabilities can be used for good or evil, depending on the designs of the empowered. One of the main arguments that governments use these days (such as the FBI re: smartphone security/crypto) against allowing "common man" to use crypto is that criminals can use it for sex slavery and other crimes. This is a good argument…

I love how the answer to the problem isn't solving the problem. It's to strip everyone of their privacy, instead.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#49

Post by jmeyer2k »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #8

There's a slight variation on this that I had pondered for designing a distributed election algorithm. I'm sure the idea is not novel, but it would be nice to know what work has been done on it. The goal is to fairly select some candidate from a set of candidates. Each candidate `Ci` generates a UUID `Ui`. The hash of their UUID `hash(Ui)` is published by each candidate. Once all hashes have been collected, each cand…

This is generally referred to as a RANDAO in cryptoeconomics. The problem is that a candidate can decide not to reveal their preimage `Ui` and affect the outcome of the RANDAO in that way.

https://github.com/randao/randao

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#50

Post by exolymph »

opnitro wrote: post #47
malgorithms wrote: post #27

I'd be curious if people on HN would want a zero knowledge survey and voting system inside Keybase, and if so, what would it look like? The background: we talk about it sometimes as a solution to a real problem: in certain teams and workplaces, people can be afraid to give honest feedback (who dares to submit an "anonymous" survey to HR?), but Keybase may be in a unique position to let people in a group give written…

I worry this ends up being a technical solution to what is ultimately a social problem. If the problem is that people feel threatened submitted feedback at their workplace, the issue is the structure of the workplace.

Eh, not if it's cryptographically impossible (barring a zero-day vuln) for the higher-ups to trace back who submitted what.
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