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Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#51

Post by jamesjamesm »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #11
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…

Keybase's main competitor seems to be Slack. I don't use Slack but I assume that Slack can read all your messages if they want to, so privacy is the main differentiator. All these little quality-of-life improvements on top of that can only be a good thing, IMHO.

Seems like it, given how shamelessly they are ripping off Slack's UI.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#52

Post by darawk »

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.

Yes, but it's possible for these structural problems to be invisible to the people who could change them, precisely because of the structure that's setup. There are definitely cases where the structure is there on purpose to create this sort of environment...and this won't do anything to fix those. But there are also cases where people are afraid to give honest feedback, but if they were able to do so in an anonymous way, management would either be pressured to, or would want to make a change.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#53

Post by kannanvijayan »

jmeyer2k wrote: post #49
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

Interesting! Thanks for the reference. I'm not sure how not revealing the pre-image would allow them to affect the result with any degree of predictability - it is equivalent to them selecting a different uuid, is it not?

I'll try to read up and see if I can answer that question.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#54

Post by i2shar »

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…

This is absolutely very useful. Definitely within a specific team or company, but generally anywhere, especially when combined with Keybase's proven identities feature. I can imagine a "Vote with Keybase" button ubiquitous on the internet wherever they want to conduct surveys.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#55

Post by kannanvijayan »

bluesign wrote: post #33
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…

It is very hard to handle candidate drop on this scenario.

Yeah that was why I sort of let go of that bit. The best solution I could come up with was to keep the population sizes small and re-run the vote if a drop occurred.

This doesn't work for large populations because the probability of a drop occurring during the selection procedure approaches 1. There, I was considering a tournament style selection - partition the population into small groups, select one from each, and treat the winners as a new candidate population.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#56

Post by JshWright »

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…

"Sorry if this sounds harsh or rude, there's no point in sugar coating the truth"

You're an idiot if you believe that.

(Still agree?)

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#57

Post by DuskStar »

stackzero wrote: post #40

How does this address the last revealer problem?

Assuming you mean the attack where one person can wait to be the last to reveal their secret and then influence the game by dropping out, it doesn't appear to.

> What if someone loses network before the secret stage?

> A bad actor can't change the outcome of a flip but could prevent it from resolving.

> The Keybase app will highlight this scenario. Odds are it was just a network issue, but if you have such a person disappearing often, you should break up with them.

So someone with a malicious client could force the flip to not resolve until it creates an outcome they're satisfied with, which is... Not great. I can't tell if "The Keybase app will highlight this scenario" means it'll abort the roll or if it'll automatically reroll.

Re: Cryptographic coin flipping, now in Keybase

#58

Post by pshc »

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.

That’s a fair point, but even if workplace norms are sane, the technical solution additionally protects against (say) a rogue IT admin gathering info in secret, or against future policy changes.
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