Bitcoin Forum

Never heard of RSA before,

I am interested in hearing the talk with that tagline.  Links?

I think that might be a bit of an overstatement.  OS security has improved in recent years but has decreased in the application and web layer.  The number of critical flaws in Windows, Wordpress, and and other mainstream apps has been decreasing but the proliferation of applications has made gross vulnerabilities increase.

Adi more specifically said we're "winning the battles, losing the war".

meaning what exactly?  gov'ts gaining more ability to crack cryptography?

Never heard of RSA before, I am interested in hearing the talk with that tagline.  Links?

Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
...
He didn't express any concerns about the viability of Bitcoin's economics or core technology, though.
...

Never heard of RSA? :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Security

I suspect he means that it's a hopeless cause to try and build a secure system on top of operating systems that are fundamentally insecure.  You likely need to start over from the ground up and have security in mind at every step of the way (perhaps even getting into trust issues relating to the proprietary hardware and microcode that virtually all computers are based on).

That's the best news I've heard in a while.  I'll likely be bumping up my hoarding operation and taking the acquisition part of it to the next level (once I study his comments for myself at least.)

Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
He says he wouldn't want to keep cash on his computer given how easily computers can be hacked, and that we're losing the war on computer security.
He didn't express any concerns about the viability of Bitcoin's economics or core technology, though.
This was following a talk he gave with the tagline "why we need cryptography, and why it won't help us".

Next time you meet Dr. Shamir, can you ask him if he is Satoshi by any chance?

My hope is that bitcoin will force the issue that we need a new operating system that is designed with security in mind.  The OSes we're using today are all based on 40+ year old technology.  Here's an interesting project that I think may eventually provide the underpinnings for such an OS:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392791,00.asp

Never heard of RSA before, I am interested in hearing the talk with that tagline.  Links?

Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.

He says he wouldn't want to keep cash on his computer given how easily computers can be hacked, and that we're losing the war on computer security.

He didn't express any concerns about the viability of Bitcoin's economics or core technology, though.

This was following a talk he gave with the tagline "why we need cryptography, and why it won't help us".

Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.

Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/584

Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph

Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir

Abstract: The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction graph. In this paper we answer for the first time a variety of interesting questions about the typical behavior of account owners, how they acquire and how they spend their Bitcoins, the balance of Bitcoins they keep in their accounts, and how they move Bitcoins between their various accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the transaction graph.

Category / Keywords: Bitcoin, digital coins, electronic cash, payment systems, transaction graphs, quantitative analysis

Date: received 14 Oct 2012

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab.

—Buckminster Fuller

Thank you! Must have been an interesting little chat you had.