Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair
does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
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Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#402On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
like cash?
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#403>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key. Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile). The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addres…
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?
Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin?
In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#404I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do…
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc. In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty…
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right. This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win. The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only…
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win. I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party sy…
> it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode
The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.
But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]
> the lesser of evils
That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341
[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shooti…
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem . It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid. To be clear, the book…
Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?
For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have. Case in point: Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered w…
That was supposed to be the whole point of the Free (Libre) Software movement, not about cost/price and not about features/functionality... it was about being in control of your destiny and not being chained to the whims of a corporation!
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right. This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win. The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only…
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win. I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party sy…
Duverger’s law: first past the post results in two party system.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#409This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right. This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win. The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only…
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal. Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways. On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve a…
I think you missed my entire point, so much that I thank you for demonstrating it. Rather than some abstract "my parents", I can say "like this."
> Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
This is a given.
> On my team
> On the other team
One does not need always compare. We can both evaluate a single political party by its merits, absent of everything else, while also being able to evaluate how they stand comparatively. In fact, you can't even do the latter without doing the former first!
All you've accomplished is perpetuating the two evils. You perpetuate the evil you vote for my allowing them to excuse their actions in justification of fighting the greater. You have no power to change what you've chosen as greater and you've abdicated the power to make your lesser even less evil, instead choosing to gave it power to become more evil!
Think carefully about what you say. It's not only Siths who speak in absolutes, but evil does thrive on over-simplification.