josh2600

To design a secure system one must first ask who is going to attack it and with what forces.

Making truly secure systems is an art and is rarified ground.

In BigCo you have ego that blocks authentic artistic critique. There are traditions. There are rules. We learned our lesson last time.

In the best organizations, artistic critique is a time-honored tradition passed down from the elders to the padwans. Young Jedi learn how to navigate the matrix with the blessings of their ancestors.

Unfortunately, hacking culture in a big org is outré. What made Apple special was that Steve Jobs created many hidden micro cultures within his asylum that allowed so many unorthodox experiments, some of them even worked out.

Maybe you have some other examples of people who have been able to hold a core business and build the next iteration many many times successfully? They’re rare birds.

Edit: for clarity, Google could have a killerAI product in a year if they would kill their ego. Demis Hassibis (I think that’s how you spell his name, sorry) the CEO @ DeepMind can absolutely build the thing they want, but they’d have to give him carte Blanche, and they won’t.

These seem like academic toys.

Pre-processing a dynamic database is a non-starter. No database that is used for any real world use case is static at scale, especially not internet traffic.

I’m not expecting FHE that’s fast in my lifetime, but I’ve been wrong before.

Context: I led a team which built the first open source production-grade implementation of hardware-accelerated PIR which is currently at use at scale.

It’s more reliable than any other short notice moving service I’ve used, but a little higher cost. I guess you get what you pay for.

Mitnick had so many stories that entranced the people around him. I heard one second hand of Mitnick dealing with a bank who had early voice verification software. Upon meeting the CEO he gave the executive his card and departed for the evening. Arriving back at his hotel, he called the CEO and asked him to read his phone number to him. The phone number contained all ten digits which Mitnick had neatly tape recorded so as to make the CEO’s voice reproducible. He then proceeded to use the bank’s vocal banking system to transfer $1 from the CEO’s account to his as the authentication mechanism was reading out your own account number in your voice.

When Mitnick arrived back in the board room the architect of the voice verification system was crestfallen and the bank CEO delivered a check on a silver platter.

Now how much of that tale is embellished I will never know as it was second hand, but that was the kind of whimsy Mitnick brought to our world.

Rest in Power.

CBDCs are a substrate. There will always be integrations to the substrate.

Ideally protocols are as simple as possible and applications utilize them to build bespoke services. If the protocol itself is too customizable it becomes extremely difficult to interop.

There’s still the dust catching port on the iPhone itself but avoiding the cable having a dust cavity is a huge win.

I have had apple chargers fail in the second year of operation.

It worked out well for encryption in the 90’s…

I had the distinct pleasure of working with Bob daily for the last few years. Bob was an incredible human being who I will miss every day. He was my friend and someone who drank deeply from the cup of life. He had a way of seeing the world that was enchanting. He was a visionary in so many ways.

Bob led product for our team for years but that's probably the least interesting thing on his resume. He was the one of the early creators of Android, founding CTO at Square, and the inventor of CashApp. To be honest, none of his tech accomplishments compare to the person that he was.

Everywhere Bob went he made friends. He did this by being a person who brought people together. He was loved far and wide because of his ability to build community.

I will close with this: Bob joined MobileCoin because he believed in a future where we have protections from predatory corporations and criminals. He was always thinking about others. That is what I will remember about him. He wanted to protect and nurture the world.

We are taking space to grieve now. Bob is survived by his family and friends who want privacy in this difficult time.

https://get.moby.app/rememberingbob

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.

Most companies in crypto want to be regulated but haven’t been able to reach a shared plateau of understanding with the SEC.

One way or another, we’re going to end up with regulation soon.

Maybe ChatGPT trainers will eventually have ELO's.

Barney Frank straight up says as much: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1635328056234766337?s....

Edit: FWIW, I have no insider knowledge of what was happening at Signature, but there's no one I've talked to in Crypto who was aware of risk at that bank. This is quite in contrast to Silvergate where it was well known that the bank was not healthy.

I was not a signature customer, but at Silvergate, even things as simple as changing an authorized user on an account took months or years to complete. I'm still an authorized user on an account at Silvergate that I haven't worked at in ~4 years (despite many, many customer service requests to be removed including repeatedly signed documents).

So much of why Silvergate failed was simply business execution.

Signal or GTFO.

The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?"

For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

A guy showed up to a location with a duffel bag and a handgun. I put some money into a bag and gave him a public key. We sat there for about 20 minutes and chitchatted while we waited for the BTC to arrive in my wallet.

All you kids with your fancy exchanges and dexes these days!

All innovation, all technology can be wielded for good or for evil.

With fire anyone can burn a building or cook a steak.

I like to find the people who are using technology to help others.

Let's make stuff to amplify them.

What happened as I understand the lore is that one year a NANOG you had a bunch of young network operators basically get together and say “well, we’re done with this circuit stuff, we’re moving to packets where it’s a network of routers that make decisions about how each chunk of data is moved through the network based on headers.” The telco operators laughed at them because packet routing is much harder to guarantee deliverability of data than a circuit and they didn’t understand why people would want cheaper unreliable data routing for their internet service.

Of course, over time, packet routing has won for everyone except the largest orgs who have dedicated circuits that aren’t shared bandwidth. For anyone that’s used a direct 10GB fiber line that isn’t shared vs a cable modem that is overprovisioned to hell, the dedicated circuit is a whole different class of internet access (and 100-1000x the cost).

SIP vs dedicated trunks is kinda the same thing.

Please note that we didn’t roll or build Dalek, so again, this is a mischaracterization.

Also, yes, we are doing quite a bit that’s novel and interesting. For example, we implemented the first at-scale private information recovery system (entitled MobileCoin Fog) which makes extensive use of PATH and Circuit Oblivious RAM (and all of our stuff is open source). There’s quite a bit of new and creative stuff in our GitHub if you want to poke around.

This removes cofactor attacks which famously allowed multi-spend. Dalek removes or severely reduces this possibility.

25519, ristretto group.

Stablecoins derive stability through a system. This system uses collateralization to present a fixed price. In its most simplistic form the system has $1 for every $1 in it. Unfortunately, in such a system, there is no point in the virtualization, which is called hypothecation in finance.

Hypothecated assets exist to allow asymmetric risk. Think of it this way:

* Alice runs a bank and has dollars in it.

* Bob runs a stablecoin and wants it to be backed by dollars.

* Alice says "you can mint $1 of hnUSD for every dollar I have in my bank."

* Bob mints 1 hnUSD.

* Alice invests the dollar in their bank into US treasuries to earn a yield backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government.

* Bob is free to use his hnUSD for whatever he wants to do in his ecosystem and Alice will be able to redeem it when he brings it back to Alice's bank when she sells her US treasury.

The problem in all of these systems is actually hauntingly simple: Liquidity is king.

In the event that Bob needs dollars quickly, Alice may not be able to sell treasuries quickly. This is called a liquidity crisis.

Before we start pointing fingers at cryptocurrency, take a second and think about how banks work. All of banking is built on hypothecation and risk management. The businesses that stand the test of time in finance are the ones that manage risk most effectively. There is a time to be bullish, and a time to be bearish. Having the wisdom to know the difference is often won only with battle scars.

I am thankful for the public-private partnership that facilitates humanity's collective dream through finance. I am hopeful that we can learn the lessons of the past to not repeat history's mistakes.

The future of finance is on-chain governance/on-chain proof of reserves/on-chain liquidation.

As a kid I grew up on 2600hz lore and the magic of the blue boxes, all of the witchcraft that went into making those insane switching infrastructures. How the world became so flat so fast is beyond my comprehension.

I was born a child without the Internet. We are now living in an age where the Internet is not only ubiquitous, but now increasingly omnipresent. We are dwelling in a saturation of signals the likes of which our ancestors could only dream of, but here we are today, in a world where we still have food crises, and individual autonomy conspiracies.

We have all of the signal, how do we cut through the noise?

I am excited by the helpers. The people who run towards the action and try to make a difference. The people who are working on healing the world.

Comms are the key to faster interactivity. I am delighted to see our species striving to have easier, faster, lower cost connectivity.

I think both of these compounds raise your blood pressure a lot. That’s not good for a lot of existing conditions.