Well, my machine's been stable for the last couple of days.  Either it really was just a string of coincidences, or whoever's been messing with it decided it wasn't worth their while any more.

I've been reading the patent stuff.  Interestingly, Friedman has a patent which is still current for a rotor machine with rotor movements controlled by paper tape.  He applied for the patent nearly seventy years before it was finally granted.  Inbetween, the application was classified.

It's a sound system; secure given WWII levels of traffic, which is more than we can say of most rotor machines.  But it wouldn't stand up to cryptanalysis given what we consider "reasonable" levels of traffic today "with streaming video, etc.  Which is reasonable I suppose; if you actually built it out of matter with, you know, mass and inertia limited tensile strength and other inconvenient properties, and tried to run it at those speeds? It would just explode.

So I guess "secure for the amount of traffic it is physically capable of encoding" is a reasonable endorsement.  Once you reach the point where the physical system is the weakest link, you can derive no benefit from making the encryption better.

A fair amount like the first one on that page, except that the breech is all the way back at the tail end of the stock and the barrel is that much longer (and heavier).


They are insanely expensive all right.  Jason was paying $15K and up, per piece.  But you're going to pay that when you want something that there's only ever going to be one of.


That's kinda awesome.  But Jason and his crew don't really give a crap about how powerful it is; he'd be as happy shooting a BB gun if it could reliably hit a target dead center from upwards of a mile away.  Happier even, because then practice shooting wouldn't cost so darn much.  But that far downrange, high-power rounds are the only ones that reliably arrive exactly where the gun was pointing.

Hm.  There is a place to go with this now that I think about it, but it's a little weird.

With current process technology, if you are willing to design for half the speed, you can do it for a quarter of the power.  And if you're willing to go a quarter of the speed, you can do it for one-sixteenth of the power, and so on.

It sounds like if 21 wants to integrate small-scale mining into a host of consumer products, they're going to need tiny mining rigs that run on just a watt or two - but those rigs, although much slower, could be drastically more *efficient* in hashes produced per power consumed than what's filling up server farms today.

If you take a 200w mining chip and then design for slower speed - half speed is 50w, quarter speed is 12.5w, 1/8 speed is 3.25 watts.  The payoff would be very slow, but positive relative to the hashes/power tradeoff that miners are doing now.  A fair number of the things we have in our homes consume 3.25 watts just in standby currents to keep a little LED on and a little timer running and their program memory refreshed, etc... 

Of course, equilibrium will be reached; whether the market is saturated by 21 inc's devices or whether miners replace their current infrastructure with similarly slow/cool chips, ROI on the more efficient devices will approach zero just as surely as it already has for USB sticks.

On the other hand, in contexts where the heat produced *IS* the point of the appliance, there is at least a possibility that by using electricity that the consumer would be buying anyway (and using to produce heat) the devices could be profitable. In terms of marginal cost that really is free power.

This gets back to the guy in Minnesota who replaced his electric house heating system with S3's.  Not the most efficient miner any more, but when the thermostat kicks it on, it still makes him more profit than his old electric heater ever did and produces the same amount of heat for the same amount of electricity consumed.

Can't rule it out, really, but you are probably right.  Remember what Ron Popiel is rumored to have said when someone suggested design improvements to some angling equipment his company was making.

"Yeah, it would be better for catching fish but that's stupid.  The damn thing isn't supposed to catch fish, it's supposed to catch fishermen."

If you think it's the investors who are being ripped off, then similarly, we could be looking at an investment proposal that isn't supposed to produce a profitable company but is supposed to convince investors that it might.

But I happen to think it's the consumers who are being ripped off, and this is -- also similar -- a proposal for a (probably profitable) company which produces devices which are not supposed to make a profit but are supposed to convince consumers that they might. 

Doesn't have to be illegal to be private.  Some folks are embarrassed about things like buying a dirty magazine and a tube of hand lotion.

I have done some long-range target shooting with .50 cal rifles that the owner had custom made and ordered in from across the country (he lived in Nevada; the rifles were made in Tennesse).  

The darn things are monsters.  Bullpup arrangement with the barrel going all the way back to the shoulder, but it's a darn 48-inch barrel.  Bolt-action breech closure with no magazine whatsoever; you load shells one at a time.  They weigh as much as a jackhammer and they put holes in manhole covers from over a mile away.  And if you're really good, which I'm not, they put holes dead center in manhole covers from over a mile away.  

He used to joke about having one made in .666 caliber and calling it a "light antichrist weapon"

Pretty sure that shop doesn't accept Bitcoin, but hey, they could surprise me.  

Actually not true. When one mining pool is masquerading as a member of another, it can sometimes increase profits by sub-block switching once it reaches the point where a share award would be split with a lot of other shares. 

It's a well-known profitable strategy for individual miners, despite a number of pools that engage in various schemata to try to eliminate its profitability.  And everything that's profitable for individual miners has been done, in at least a few incarnations, by pools.

There is no point in someone who is watched as closely as me making any such attempt; it would only arouse further suspicion.   

Honestly electronics can be designed to work at very high temperatures; the problem with that, is that the ways we know how to do it will produce electronics that DON'T work until they reach some approximation of those temperatures.

So, yeah, if you wanted to build chips that operate at 200 degrees celsius you could do it.  But you'd have to get them up to at least boiling temperature before they'd start to work.

About reject messages:  It's possible for a node to say that it is rejecting a new tx, but doing so doesn't reveal much w/r/t the  behavior of the whole network.  So that's not terribly useful.

The net effect of full blocks - soft limit or hard - is that confirmation time goes up and transaction confirmation becomes unreliable.  It takes longer if it happens and until that time you don't know whether it is going to happen or not.  This is a recipe for frustration.  People will HATE this with a capital H. 

There are two predictable results:  Higher fee rates and lower transaction volumes.  It is my opinion that frustrated users leaving would lower transaction volumes to a rate where miners cannot be supported by higher fee rates.  In fact I opine that frustrated users leaving would lower transaction volumes *so* much that fee rates would not sustainably increase at all.   If you want to support miners, you want very low fee rates on very high transaction volumes.

There is a market inaccuracy in the structure of Bitcoin:  The costs of the bandwidth and storage paid as fees are not being collected by the full node operators who provide that bandwidth and storage.   The block subsidy is paid for network security which is what the miners provide by hashing; but fees proportional to bandwidth and storage costs, in an accurate market, should be going to the people who are providing the bandwidth and storage.   Otherwise we can expect a "tragedy of the commons" situation to develop in the long run as miners are the only ones motivated to provide that bandwidth and storage.  One can expect that bandwidth provided by a miner will NOT serve to distribute tx to all nodes - only to the miner.  The result, at the extreme, would be that no one other than the miner will even see the tx in the memory pool until a block containing the tx is published. Miners might even have entirely disjoint sets of tx, none of which will ever confirm until or unless that particular miner gets a block.

Wow.  This is like some weird psy-op where someone comes up with completely nonsense accusations against the NSA solely to get people like me to defend it - because maybe if I get used to defending it from really stupid accusations I'll consider defending it against accusations that are, uh, accurate?  Or anyway plausible?  You sure you're not drawing a government paycheck for this silliness?  It'd be a heck of a sweet job if you can get it.

Dude, it ain't gonna work.  They are what they are and they do what they do.  They have promoted both unsound and sound crypto in the past.  You handle that by completely ignoring their recommendations.  You have to judge the crypto on its merits. 

Bzzzt, wrong.  This is Kerckhoff's principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle Auguste Kerckhoff got this one before there even WERE computers. 

If you want something that's secure and you want to get people to trust it, you want it out where everybody can see it and check for themselves that it's secure. 

And history has borne this out.  Virtually everybody who comes up with a "proprietary" crypto primitive that they don't reveal, has come up with one that gets ripped to shreds in short order when push comes to shove.

I have wisdom to share: This is originally a line from Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eigth Dimension:

"No matter where you go, there you are."

You, with money, are the same person as you, without money.  Having money may change the way you live, but get over the idea that it will change you.  It won't.  If you expect it to, you'll waste a lot of time trying to figure out who you are.  And if you do shit you don't like or aren't good at, expecting that you will like it or be good at it now that you have money, you're being dumb.  If you're unhappy without money, you'll probably be unhappy with money.  If you can't form stable relationships because you don't value other people enough, you'll still have that problem when you have money.  etc. 

So, long-story-short: money is a tool, not an aspect of identity.

This isn't necessarily a ripoff.  This is for people who'd be using the power to generate heat anyway.  Any of these appliances that doesn't require the generation of heat for its own sake though, is going to be a dead loss when generating heat for the production of bitcoin.

I'm kind of liking this for some purposes, though mostly silly ones.  For example England now has a law that says you can't have hair dryers that are over 1 KWatt because that's a waste of electricity.  But if you can have a Bitcoin mining machine that, as a side effect, dries your hair ....  

Also?  Unlike a lot of the crap which people have released on the consumer market that wasn't really possible to secure against people hacking it to their own purposes, this is *COMPLETELY* secureable.  

It doesn't require simultaneous delivery of and obscurement of information, such as all the copy-protection crap.  It doesn't require keys the customer could use to spoof it to be present in the device, like so many other kinds of crypto snake oil.  I could easily produce these devices using a public key to check signatures on getwork and encrypt responses, bake it directly into silicon, and even if you reverse-engineer the silicon and extract the public key, you couldn't use it without the private key to get the device (or any other device using that key pair) talking to a different pool.  

As the consumer, your choices are to let it have network access, or not.  

Interestingly, if you let it have network access, and its communications are encrypted, there's no way to know what it's communicating FROM INSIDE YOUR HOUSE.  The power budget for hacking wifi passwords isn't much different from the power budget for bitcoin mining, for example, and a lot of these "appliances"  have subassemblies which provide side channels that could be used as microphones, etc.  

There are plenty of ways to arrange a provably honest gambling game that don't involve block or transaction hashes, and can be done as often as you like instead of just when blocks come out.  Here's a simple one.

Let's say Alice and Bob are doing a gambling game where they need a series of random numbers (die rolls, card draws, whatever) that are provably predictable to neither and provably chosen by neither.

Bob picks a random number R_Bob (say, 256 bits from his /dev/random output) and Alice picks R_Alice.

Bob hashes R_Bob to get R_B(0), hashes R_B(0) to get R_B(1), hashes R_B(1) to get R_B(2), etc.....  Likewise Alice hashes R_Alice to get R_A(0), hashes R_A(0) to get R_A(1), hashes R_A(1) to get R_A(2), etc.

Now Bob tells Alice R_B(999) and Alice tells Bob R_A(999), and they can start play with N=999.

Each time they need a random number, they subtract 1 from N and reveal the corresponding R_A(N) and R_B(N).  Bob can check that R_A(N+1) is the hash of R_A(N), and Alice can check that R_B(N+1) is the hash of R_B(N), so each knows that the other is providing the next number in their sequence and not one they just picked for a chosen result.  Alice is sure that Bob didn't know R_A(N) until she revealed it, and Bob is sure that Alice didn't know R_B(N) until he revealed it.

And the random number they need, for the card draw or the die roll or whatever, is just R_A(N) XOR R_B(N) (restricted to whatever range the game allows it to have, like 0.. 54 for a card draw or 0.. 6 for a die roll). Each can be sure the random number was unknown to the other until both numbers are revealed, and each can be sure it isn't chosen by the other.  

And if N ever becomes equal to zero, they just pick a new R_Alice and R_Bob, exchange a new R_A(999) and R_B(999), and continue the game.  

You have said one sentence on which we agree, and one on which we don't. 

I do not give a crap who developed a sort algorithm, because I can tell when things are sorted correctly and I can prove that the algorithm does sort things correctly in every case. 

And hashing, given the level of mathematical sophistication and effort applied by people who are NOT controlled by any particular agency, is not very different from sorting in this regard.

Except ask yourself one question.  Why would any honest actor provide this service?

Let's say the provider lives in an area where he is allowed to steal electricity from the local taxpayers (artifically subsidized power costs, such as in China or wherever).  Let's say the provider has the hardware to actually do the hashing.

It's clear that a dishonest provider could run a scam by renting out hashing power for more than it earns.  But assuming the provider is honest, under what circumstances would it be more profitable for the provider to rent out that hashing power than it would be to just use it? 

... crickets chirp ...

That's right!  No circumstances at all!

Making a deal with someone who makes less profit in that deal than s/he would by not making it, is asking to be ripped off.  Because it's dead solid that no such actor would be there if they aren't trying to rip you off. 

And that definitely answers who it is that believes he's wrong. 

Mr. No-ice-please... 

You are certain that "SHA-256 will eventually be broken." 

I am certain that "eventually" in this case does not mean "within the next 50 years."

So ...  If you're under, say, 30, or otherwise have plans to survive well beyond what are currently considered as biological limitations for the basic human design by some means, I would like to make a bet with you. 

Got a couple BTC you're willing to commit to long-term escrow?