[Cryptography] Best internet crypto clock

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Thu Oct 23 00:20:46 EDT 2014


At 08:00 PM 10/22/2014, David Leon Gil wrote:
>On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps a better source would be something that couldn't possibly be hacked -- e.g., variations in solar flux of neutrinos or other solar variations.
>
>How about using the earth's rotation? :)
>
>http://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/DataProducts/EarthOrientationData/eop.html;jsessionid=5F896E89B594D8D5B7A9E38DE4AD6BF0.live1
>
>Only Superman can hack that...

Agreed, but how cheap/easy are variations in the Earth's rotations to check?

Remember, the whole point of the exercise is to minimize the asymmetry ratio of checking-costs to manipulating-costs, and to make checking-costs cheap enough that many, many checkers will be checking.

The Bitcoin blockchain is cheap to check, and there are a lot of folks who have much more to lose than a few seconds if the blockchain has been tampered with.  The Bitcoin blockchain is still a little too easy to manipulate; future digital currencies with orders of magnitude more transactions will be far harder to manipulate.  E.g., many still feel that the Fed is manipulating even the S&P500 these days with "plunge protection":

http://nypost.com/2014/10/20/plunge-protection-behind-markets-sudden-recovery/



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