Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

The back door angle isn't hard to solve, just have the launchers manufacture 1,000 identical probes, then let the community randomly choose one to launch. The others can be checked for back doors. The launchers would have to balance the chance of getting caught against the chance of launching a clean probe, and the bigger the number the better the odds are on both sides.

View on HN

All you need is a copy of private key to compromise such system and generate and sign fake transactions. You could never be sure it has not been made.

The private key could be generated after the probe leaves Earth, via a process where many competing parties contribute seeding information.

Hence, barring deep compromises of the hardware, it will have never existed on Earth - only in the deep "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) of the off-planet hardware.

It does rather seem that the default answer with anything cryptocurrency is to waste vast amounts of energy with replication.

Its called a tradeoff.

There is this obsession with speed and efficiency in computing. The tradeoff for a secure decentralized system anyone can use and audit is that its slow and inefficient. There are real benefits to adopting systems like this for some tasks and problems we face - like transparency in political and economic systems.

And this is an unacceptable tradeoff when we are facing a climate change crisis, unless the energy cost can be greatly reduced.

Interesting idea. I was going to ask how we know they didn't perform some sleight of hand at the last moment with a secret 1,001st probe. But I guess if we can confirm that the private key is securely and randomly generated we can verify the validator's public key once it's in orbit. OK, let's do this.

Alternatively, set things up so that you can use the same public key as used by the signing probes as the target address on another block chain. Dump $1B into the target address.

As long as the money remains untouched, you can be fairly confident that no one has the private key.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com