[Cryptography] On Security Architecture, The Panopticon, And "The Law"

Natanael natanael.l at gmail.com
Thu Dec 26 16:11:59 EST 2013


Why do you think Bitcoin is a ponzi? It rather mimics the mining process of
precious metals in digital form. (There is also no need for it to go up and
up forever. And I'd like to note that I actually have bought things with
them.)

And regarding Ripple,  that system relies entirely on mutual trust in
between a set of servers. It can not scale and at the same time ensure a
high level of (well founded) trust. It's a weird form of web of trust,
where the users have very little say in the process.

IMHO the best choice would be a P2P system ("federation" is OK, no need for
most users to run full nodes tracking all public conversations ever posted)
where each post simply references the previous posts seen by that person
(maybe with a Merkle tree hash), where the current state occasionally is
synced to the blockchain in the form of a checksum (for timestamping and
tamper proofing). I don't yet have any particular opinion on how the
details should work.

(And I do not like the design of Bitmessage either, I doubt it can scale.
There is no need to force every peer to keep everything in the chain or to
keep it up to date 24/7.)

Bitcoin SPV nodes are an interesting comparison, they rely on servers
hosting the full chain, themselves they just hold the headers and the full
blocks that apply to themselves. And the servers are fundamentally Bitcoin
nodes like any other (except with an additional API layer for the SPV
clients to use, like Stratum).

I like Bote mail in I2P (DHT based). Syndie is another interesting piece of
software ("syndication based"), but it doesn't seem to perform very well
and doesn't seem all to reliable.

- Sent from my phone
Den 26 dec 2013 19:43 skrev "Bill Cox" <waywardgeek at gmail.com>:

> On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Bill Frantz <frantz at pwpconsult.com>wrote:
>
>> The bigest problem I can see with leaving the third parties out is that
>> is -- where's the revenue model that provides an economic incentive to
>> drive adoption? Even when third parties start out with a privacy goal, they
>> provide a place to pry as seen by RIM's and Skype's dance with the national
>> security agencies. There needs to be a revenue model, perhaps a distributed
>> revenue model like Bitcoin's enabling of low cost electronic monitory
>> exchange and the opportunity to make money by minting.
>>
>
> I agree.  We need a distributed global commit-only database, and some sort
> of revenue model.  The BitCoin solution is extremely cool, but in the end
> it's basically a Ponzi scheme.  The value of the coins keeps going up, but
> no one is using them to buy anything.
>
> I have some dumb ideas in this area.  I think we could build a P2P system
> that allows Ripple-style microtransactions.  It could allow us to plug in
> our Raspberry Pi's and sell services such as storage of encrypted data or
> email, speeding up downloads in torrents, or hosting games, files or web
> sites.
>
> The financial incentives would be that we essentially get free Rasberry
> Pi's and other server hardware while users get cheap services.  The P2P
> aspects are hard, but IMO, the crypto part is even harder.  As soon as
> there is anything of value online that we can trade, it becomes a target.
>
>
>> General purpose hardware manufacturers are as rare as Unicorns, making
>> them a logical target for black coercion. A possible solution to hardware
>> compromise is to run crypto code through one or more layers of
>> interpretation, so it will be hard for the hardware to detect what
>> computations are being performed.
>>
>
> Even something as simple and cheap as a Raspberry Pi is so complex that it
> could have multiple back-doors and unintended security weaknesses in both
> hardware and software.  iPhones keep getting rooted, demonstrating that
> even the most valuable company in the world can't secure a phone.
>
> I agree a possible solution is multiple layers, preferably multiple layers
> of hardware.  For example, a simple USB stick microprocessor could have a
> small single-chip RAM buffer that can electrically connect to either the
> host PC/Rasberry Pi, or the USB microprocessor, but only one at a time.
>  The USB microprocessor could be FPGA based, making it also more easily
> auditable, and we could have a discrete zener-noise based RNG that can be
> fully probed providing random data.  All signing of things could be done in
> the FPGA.  If that could be done for $20 and plugged into a $35 Rasberry
> Pi, just maybe we'd be able to build a P2P system we could trust enough to
> enable microtransactions.  After that, all kinds of services might follow.
>
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