Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
I wouldn't be worrying about the algorithms so much as I'd worry about all of the end-users who are going to get their keys stolen and their wallets drained thanks to the deluge of new vulnerabilities in operating systems, browsers, wallets, personal agents and other software.
What good are strong cryptography primitives for cryptocurrency if your "CEO" can successfully make calls to reorganize the chain?
Ethereum only did a surgical state change on a smart contract. It wasn’t a rollback like Satoshi.
It's ancient history. It's like still criticizing Apple for how they handled Copland OS.
Let’s also not forget that Satoshi actually rolled back the chain in 2010 after a hacker printed 184 billion BTC.
I know, at the micro level some people would lose their money, but does bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) have any practical, legitimate use with visible impact on the global economy (or even the national eonomy of any country with major footprint)? And I'd be sad for some of those people. but would it have any impact that I would notice? My money is in broad, boring index funds.
I've read anecdotes on HN that it's used quite a bit for remittances to some countries with unstable currencies, but my understanding is that nearly all of these users are immediately converting it to the local currency, so the only money at risk would be that which is in active transit. It would definitely be unfortunate to lose any money being transferred, but remittance recipients don't tend to have any savings at all, so I don't think that it would have any broader economic effects (in the context of this specific example).
It could also potentially mess with electricity prices in some areas, since Bitcoin mining uses quite a bit of power, but I suspect that some AI datacenter would step in and buy up all the excess power, so this probably wouldn't be much of an issue either.
(And I don't know enough to comment about how this could affect other sectors of the economy)
I can confirm that this aspect is absolutely massive and often underestimated by those living in the West.
It's happening all over Africa, Middle East and LATAM, since stablecoin transactions are cheaper and require no access to financial infrastructure that could be locally unavailable, but as you mentioned it's only used as an intermediate link before converting to local currency.
I just looked up the world bank’s estimates which say remittances are around $850B (including direct co-party islamic cash transfers, illegal in many countries). The amount using crypto is about $26B, so about 3%, hardly material at a macro scale (might be a big deal for a small country) so losing this would not be noticeable to the global economy.
And I’m from a small country and I have no illusion that many people would care much if Australia were leveled and all the people killed by a series of bad earthquakes. There would be sad headlines for a few weeks and then something else would get everyone’s attention. That’s why I was asking about anything at the global scale. Someone replied with the Hormuz Strait, and while small, it does have an enormous global impact. But that was the only such answer I got.
(BTW geologically that’s pretty much impossible to happen to Australia - -it’s just an example).
But a good example of a macro impact on the global economy.
Large financial institutions are already doing work using stablecoins. In order to turn stablecoins back into fiat, you have to take them back to the issuer for exchange. Countries with unstable currencies can hold USD by purchasing stablecoins. And financial institutions can do settlement between each other using stablecoins.
It could grow, of course, though the use case appears to be weak and unstable countries, which are by definition distant participants of global exchange, and unlikely to have any visible effect on the overall macro economy.
> And financial institutions can do settlement between each other using stablecoins.
Why would they bother though? How would they gain over the status quo?
There is also same-day ACH and the new FedNow. Which are faster, but still require some kind of connectivity and have fees.
The cost of stablecoin settlement is mostly the gas fees of the chosen chain. There are various optimizations possible such as private chains and off-chain ledgers (no gas) and some single on-chain settlement to minimize gas fees. Note that these type of stablecoins are closed-loop and are not publicly available.
As I said in my other post, these institutional stablecoins are mostly just MVP use cases until regulations are finalized. Depending on the final regulations, there are quite a few other possibilities.
Source, I work for a large financial institution and run a team that launched a stablecoin this year.
Aren't hashes far less reliant on math tricks?
My understanding is the problem with public-key crypto is it extremely reliant on a single math trick (e.g. the factoring problem), so if it turns out that trick was weaker than was assumed, the whole thing crumbles.
Hashes are so simple. There's no place for these crazy math attacks, which rely on rethinking long-standing and otherwise reasonable assumptions, to hide.
Surely we can all agree that there's no way to reverse a modulus.
holy heck, the planets have aligned, HN
;-)
I still hack every day (current project: pickipedia.xyz), but I'm not doing security anymore except for my own projects.
And yes, I was more making light of what seem to me to largely be political disagreements; of course I respect your work at the same time.
It seems clearer and clearer to me that nationa-states cannot possibly withstand the evolution of the internet in any dignified way, and I pray for peaceful, simple deprecation of them. It seems to me to be the sensible stance, both in terms of security and in terms of joy.
My repeated sense - right honed or wrongly - is that you defend these structures (nation-states generally, and intelligence operations / state secret brokers in particular) in ways that I find hard to reconcile, even upon extended reflection.
Currently that's a large brute force problem. But my gut is telling me is that finding a forward pass method of restraining private key generation such that we know what kind of public key hash to expect at the end, should be easier than cracking elliptic curves.
I guess depending on your outlook some might view that as "reversing" a hash, but it's not like you are getting the original input which is a impossible problem (unless there is a bunch of info you already know about the input).
We are talking billion dollars+ worth in a single address. So if either chainskey security is compromised in a way that it is conceivable to brute force it, there will definitely be plenty of targets.
I sometimes wonder if the AGI wasn't here all along . . .
We never did find out who "Satoshi Nakamoto" actually was.
I'm not seriously suggesting that an AGI has been in the wild since circa 2010s, but . . stranger things have happened. All through the aughts, then the teens, GWoT had been funneling an absolutely bananas amount of money into compute. What if, in those years, something horrifying happened, and it's already taken over. That would explain so much weirdness.