[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

Ismail Kizir ikizir at gmail.com
Sat Jan 2 00:04:43 EST 2021


On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 6:42 AM Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 11:24 PM Deryk Makgill <makgill at makgill.ch> wrote:
>
>> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> On Thursday, December 31, 2020 2:17 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net>
>> wrote:
>> ...
>> And as you said, the troll army that ran disinformation campaigns and
>> attacked
>> node implementations and companies trying to raise the blocksize with
>> letters
>> to the SEC, DDoS, delistings and negative review brigades were highly
>> effective.
>>
>
> Standards trolls are a very real issue in standards processes. One of the
> things I find rather strange is that some people react to the mere
> suggestion that nation state actors might get involved in directing
> communications standards with snears and derision. Or rather I did until an
> MI6 officer told me he believed an individual was using those techniques as
> a nation state actor trying to disrupt the process.
>
>
After having sent my last message and after having read what people wrote,
I decided to stop writing about this subject, and just to read what people
writes.
When I saw this message, I decided to be "more concrete", put a real life
problem example, and then to continue to follow.
Here is one:

USA, has "suspended" net neutrality for years for its institutions.
Now, they may go back to standard net neutrality, or not!
Today USA, tomorrow Turkey, China, Russia, England, France ...
There is no end!
Underlining those facts doesn't mean being against Internet!
For Bitcoin, situation is similar: I am not against cryptocurrencies.
I just think that, Bitcoin and Internet became convenient toys at hands of
big actors.
If you, people, are OK with all these, I have nothing to say.
I just wanted to emphasize my political point of view about the subject.

Technical side, it's even worse:

I don't want to enter into "horrible" details of energy consumption!
Bitcoin is "flawed by design"!

I've been writing code for more than 30 years now.
During that time, I've seen lots of people, who don't know anything
scalability, who never wrote a real, scalable code, who even don't know how
to make rough CPU cycle comparisons when coding, speaking theoretical
issues as they know everything, as they solved everything:
"Yeah! You have blockchain, you have all tools! Use them!"
Show me anyone who wrote something really scalable at "millions of
transactions per second"!
We need "billions of TPS" for real world applications!
Blockchain may be good for some, limited use cases, but in IOT world, it is
a dead-end! Dead end by design! Its nature is NOT scalable at "required
levels"!
Even Malbrain, a developer that I really respect, say such things, I really
can't believe. That's why I put some reserve.

I will finish by pointing same gun to adversaries who usually tell: "If you
can do better, do!"

Guys:

We're talking about something which has between [4.7 .. 7] TPS globally. I
wrote a range because, nobody knows the exact number. But those are actual
numbers. Some people claim there are system who can do better. How much
better? x100? x1000? x1,000,000,000?
"If you really think it's scalable and enough secure. Don't talk. Just do
it and show us! For real life scenario".

Regards
Ismail Kizir





> That was back in 1993.
>
> One service Snowden did perform for the field was that disclosure of the
> BULLRUN program made the fact the US ran these programs public record. But
> they were never the only country involved. And I really don't think it was
> the people with an open NSA affiliation who were involved in the real dirty
> tricks.
>
> Another lesson from those years was that large organizations do not speak
> with one voice or have a single interest. The people who were focused on
> trying to liberate communications behind the iron curtain did not have the
> same approach to cryptography to the people trying to maintain the decrypt
> capability on poorly implemented or sabotaged schemes being used for
> diplomatic or terrorist communications. Perhaps making so much noise on one
> was an attempt to distract attention from the other.
>
> IPSEC was derailed by a whispering campaign in the bars. We were assured
> that we absolutely had to stay firm on end to end security with perfect
> forward secrecy or nothing. And we ended up with...
>
> Same happened when we tried to make DNSSEC deployable using 32 bit
> technology after the Network Solutions acquisition. 64 bit machines were
> much more expensive and without a change to the NSEC record, DNSSEC would
> add roughly $50 million to the cost of ATLAS. That should have been a no
> brainer. But the sneaky whispering campaign won again.
>
> And of course it really isn't difficult to identify one of the ideological
> commitments that our industry gets wrapped around its axles. Designing a
> system that is 100% peer to peer with absolutely no central coordination is
> really hard and ends up requiring that to be the first priority in the
> design meaning that usability and everything else required for deployment
> fail. People still criticize the WebPKI but it has always been much less
> centralized than the Visa/Mastercard duopoly and the market leader has
> changed hands three times now.
>
> I am now adding what amounts to a shared infrastructure to the Mesh. It is
> a very small amount of centralization but it is a point of centralization
> and I know the whispering campaigners are going to use that as the point of
> attack in the crypto community. But the alternative is DNS and while I have
> no problems with people choosing to rely on DNS for service discovery I
> have a really big problem with forcing people to pay the ICANN tax just to
> get a permanent name for service discovery. And freeing people from the
> ICANN tax requires a naming registry (but not a resolution service).
>
> One of the lessons I learned from leftie politics in the 80s was that the
> person with the biggest mouth demanding ideological purity was the person
> most likely to be a government shill and that it wasn't just our government
> doing the shilling.
>
>
> Trolls will troll but we don't have to let them win. But we have to
> understand their techniques just the same as any other attacker.
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