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If the FBI has broke any of Secp256k1, SHA256, or RIPE160, (they have not) they’re not going to blow that on a $3M haul.
by wyager 5y ago
If the FBI has broke any of Secp256k1, SHA256, or RIPE160, (they have not) they’re not going to blow that on a $3M haul.
- onetimemanytime 5y agoThey might be saving for bigger things, however this is a lot more than $3million. It's about holding the US economy hostage, as these will increase in frequency.
- stingraycharles 5y agoHow is this holding the US economy hostage?
- kick_in_the_doo 5y agoRandomware attacks on energy (oil and potentially electric grid) and hospitals. And that's only what we've seen so far.
- cdaven 5y ago"Randomware" sounds much more fun. Like Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, but for software. :-)
- arcticbull 5y agoYou may know it as "undefined behavior" ;)
- kick_in_the_doo 5y agoXD
- galaxyLogic 5y agoIndeed, stopping large-scale oil pipelines means US economy is held hostage, to a degree. Not all of it but some of it. Question is will it increase or not. This FBI action gives us some hope that criminals can be stopped.
- 7dare 5y agoCan be stopped? Doesn't sound like this is what happened here, the company paying the ransom is what stopped the hostage. The FBI simply recovered the ransom (and some more), but probably can't cover for the economic damage from the hold-up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fkfowl3 5y agoThey just mention they had access to the private key of the account so that makes sense how they got access. If FBI has broken SHA256, then Bitcoin is a done deal. I hope they share how they got access to the private key.
- donkarma 5y agoIt'd be a big blow but not the end of the Bitcoin
- flatiron 5y agowhat do you mean? if they broke sha256 in any meaningful way then people can skip (or significantly game) the whole mining thing...
- thebean11 5y agoThe mining algorithm can just be changed with a hard fork. The only think that would irrevocably kill Bitcoin is breaking private keys (ie discovering others private keys, or signing transactions without private keys). A fork could not solve it as there'd be no way to prove which coins you actually owned before the fork.
- cyanydeez 5y agomany people speculate that quantum computing would crack private keys in no time. theres no speculation that this exists, but bitcoin wouldnt last in a commercial world of quantum algos
- dhsysusbsjsi 5y agoWrong. IF there exists a general purpose formula (which isn't known yet) for all quantum problems, so secp256k1 is broken, then it would only reduce the complexity sqrt(N), from 2^256 down to 2^128. Which is unsolvable. (source: Stanford cryptography I course on coursera). AND even if the elliptic curve cryptography of bitcoin is broken, say you can solve it in a year/month/week/day, the fact is most BTC unspent transaction outputs (UTXO's) are scripted "pay to public key hash". The entity proving ownership of the UTXO needs to show a public key (that is so far unknown ... if they haven't reused this address before), AND this public key needs to hash into the address, AND the signature signed by the private key verified. So if somebody announced they had solved secp256k1 and could break it in 1 week, your funds are safe. (1) They probably don't know your public key. Relax. And (2) You just wait for the BTC soft fork to support new crypto, then do a transfer to yourself. You transmit your transaction to the mempool (exposing your public key for the first time), and it will be mined in 10-30 minutes. Not enough time for the hackers to monitor the mempool and come up with a valid signature. Then your new UTXO is a different spend script for how to spend it next time using some new unbreakable crypto.