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Was encouraged but disappointed that proponents still ignore the risk that cryptographic hashes are reliant on unsolved mathematics
by justifier 9y ago
Was encouraged but disappointed that proponents still ignore the risk that cryptographic hashes are reliant on unsolved mathematics
- carlsborg 9y agoLitecoin uses scrypt and mutliple rounds of sha-256 for the proof of work. Are you referring to cryptographic signatures in general?
- justifier 9y agothe hash functions are robust, though collisions are a concern But my greater concern is in regard to nonce detection
- tyrust 9y ago>collisions are a concern Could you elaborate? Probability of collisions should be very low.
- zeroxfe 9y ago> the hash functions are robust, though collisions are a concern you are more likely to be eaten alive by ants, than witness a sha-256 collision with today's hardware > But my greater concern is in regard to nonce detection what does this mean? nonces here are used to prevent duplicate transactions.
- justifier 9y agoBut probabilities are subjective, if you build your home on a anthill your scenario's probability increases Nonces are used to find hashes that satisfy a specific 'target' requirement
- vmarsy 9y agoThat's one worrying part. The one I'm more scared about is: it's not all clear to me what would happen if the network gets suddenly partitioned. With China apparently having a big chunk of the mining power, what would happen if they decide to isolate all those miners via the 'Great Firewall'? And what happens if they keep mining, and after a few months the Firewall gates get re-opened? My understanding is that the miners are important, without them you can't have a 'liquid market' of transactions, is that right? What's the risk if you loose a huge chunk of miners overnight?
- pc2g4d 9y agoWhichever chain's the deepest wins when they reunite, right?
- amq 9y agoThe real problem would be if some group of people gathered a mining majority. Losing a huge chunk of miners overnight would have just a short effect, till the network adapts the difficulty.
- vmarsy 9y agoYeah the famous '51% attacks'. I read some of the online resources in the subject, including the one swinglock mentions[1]. And yeah the answers are a bit outdated, like the 2013 on: 'As for the merge, this is still being discussed and we do not have a good contingency plan'. The answer seems to be the 'longest chain wins' ... so that's not a 100% convincing answer. Is there a way to know the distribution of nodes per country? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172
- swinglock 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594172
- amq 9y agoIsn't basically all security around us built upon the same "unsolved mathematics"?
- justifier 9y agoI've heard this response before, but do you really feel it addresses the issue? Or are you just utilising whataboutism to cloud the issue? This is a matter of people refinancing their homes, and funds putting money into futures of an asset that has potentially always been valueless But to answer your question: yes, that bothers me too;
- amq 9y agoIf things like SHA-256, RSA or ECDSA go down, we will have a much more serious trouble than the broken Bitcoin. This is the foundation of the internet security, it protects not only Bitcoin, but also online banking, email and HN.
- brisance 9y agoAgree that there would be far-reaching consequences but remember that banking existed prior to the invention of electricity. We could go back to the old system even though it would be immensely inefficient by comparison. The same can’t be said of crypto currencies.
- drb91 9y agoBanking did exist, but not in a form that is likely to be at all palatable to modern society. The breakdown of currency would have devastating impacts on social trust.
- justifier 9y agoBtc 'goes down' that's, at the time of writing this, ~300B of who knows what vanishes Hn 'goes down' and we have to worry about mitm attacks while we information dope? seriously though, I am concerned about 'online banking, email and hn' too, but I'm also concerned about btc I wonder what percentage of people invested in btc are unaware of the complexity consequence of their investment? Perhaps similar to the percentage of people who read hn without understanding https? I would like to see this be information everybody knows because it is recited to them repeatedly Especially if we are going to be 'talking about cryptocurrency risks'
- QML 9y agoUnsolved mathematics? Can you elaborate what you mean?
- drb91 9y agoTo be fair, there is zero reason to think we will ever "solve" mathematics in the way you indicate.