Last post before 6/1/2012 wins 5 BTC... and who knows how much that will be

[BTCurious]

Bwagner: I was just going to post that! That page is part of a very good introduction to the EC math. The start of that intro is here: http://www.certicom.com/index.php/10-introduction

netrin: An analogy with "baby numbers" would go somewhat like this. I have to abstract some cryptography properties though.

Person A comes up with a number, say 13, and calls this private key 1. He then calculates the public key, which is (for example) "accb". This public key has the property that it can be easily calculated from the private key, but it also has the property that if you only know "accb", then there is no way to find out the private key was 13, unless you bruteforce all numbers by calculating the public key to all of them.
Person B comes up with a number, say 41, and calls this private key 2. He then calculates the public key, which is (for example) "bbbb".


Person A gets the public key from Person B, and adds it to his own: "accb" + "bbbb" = "cddd"
Person B gets the public key from Person A, and adds it to his own: "bbbb" + "accb" = "cddd"

Now they both have the public key "cddd", so they can send money to that public key. To retrieve the money, however, you need to have the private key.
The private key to "cddd" is 13 + 41 = 54. But no one knows this!

That's roughly how you create a private key that no one knows.



I would like to note that this is NOT diffie-hellman secret generation, as far as I know! Neither party knows the private key here, and in fact, any attacker listening to the network could know the private key too. This doesn't matter too much though, since the private key is what you need to get the money. EC diffie-hellman looks similar but is slightly different. In fact it's more like what ByteCoin described early on in the thread. In order not to confuse the thread/topic, I'll just link to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman

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[btc_artist]

Bwagner: I was just going to post that! That page is part of a very good introduction to the EC math. The start of that intro is here: http://www.certicom.com/index.php/10-introduction

netrin: An analogy with "baby numbers" would go somewhat like this. I have to abstract some cryptography properties though.

Person A comes up with a number, say 13, and calls this private key 1. He then calculates the public key, which is (for example) "accb". This public key has the property that it can be easily calculated from the private key, but it also has the property that if you only know "accb", then there is no way to find out the private key was 13, unless you bruteforce all numbers by calculating the public key to all of them.
Person B comes up with a number, say 41, and calls this private key 2. He then calculates the public key, which is (for example) "bbbb".


Person A gets the public key from Person B, and adds it to his own: "accb" + "bbbb" = "cddd"
Person B gets the public key from Person A, and adds it to his own: "bbbb" + "accb" = "cddd"

Now they both have the public key "cddd", so they can send money to that public key. To retrieve the money, however, you need to have the private key.
The private key to "cddd" is 13 + 41 = 54. But no one knows this!

That's roughly how you create a private key that no one knows.



I would like to note that this is NOT diffie-hellman secret generation, as far as I know! Neither party knows the private key here, and in fact, any attacker listening to the network could know the private key too. This doesn't matter too much though, since the private key is what you need to get the money. EC diffie-hellman looks similar but is slightly different. In fact it's more like what ByteCoin described early on in the thread. In order not to confuse the thread/topic, I'll just link to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman

Wrong thread?

[BTCurious]

Not really.

[btc_artist]

Oh, ok.

[BTCurious]

Yeah, you see, you're not so easily fooled, I guess.

[btc_artist]

[BTCurious]

Been nice talking to you though.

[btc_artist]

You take care now.

[BTCurious]

Will do!

[btc_artist]

Okay, talk to you soon!

[BTCurious]

I hope not…

[btc_artist]

Ok. Enough is enough.

[BTCurious]

Sorry, what?

[btc_artist]

I meant to imply I wasn't going to post here any more....  But I guess that didn't work.

[BTCurious]

That's up to you, though.

[btc_artist]

You're absolutely right.

[BTCurious]

Duh.

[btc_artist]

Well, now why didn't I think of that?

[btc_artist]

Let's sing:

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum

[BTCurious]

Another question-- is this, or will it be, open-sourced?

Didn't read the thread, eh? Yes, the source will be released soon.

I skimmed it, but I must have missed that.  Thanks.

It would also be very nice if you could detect a laptop/device running on battery power and not mine in that case.  http://www.google.com/search?q=get%20battery%20level%20java

That would be nice, but sadly a standard way of getting battery level information in Java doesn't seem to exist. You may be able to get it on some phones, but I don't think an unsigned applet can get that kind of information when running on a laptop.

I'm not a Java expert, but it would appear to be possible by interfacing with native OS APIs.  For example, on Windows, use JNI or JNA to call native Windows API functions to monitor battery status. Native calls could also be investigated for Linux and OSX.

Calling OS API functions from Java:
JNA http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2389156/calling-win32-api-method-from-java
JNI http://www.atwistedweb.com/java/jni.html

Windows Battery API functions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3154554/how-do-i-get-battery-information-in-windows
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/233446/monitor-battery-charge-with-win32-api

I'm not saying it's easy or even possible at this point, but I think it warrants a bit more investigation.

You also wouldn't want to mine if someone visits on a smartphone or some other low-powered device, but I guess the 2-core threshold will take care of that.

Not completely: dual-core mobile phones already exist. I will investigate, thank you for the suggestion!

You're welcome.