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Surely the modern way to sell your soul online is through NFTs?
by dkersten 5y ago
Surely the modern way to sell your soul online is through NFTs?
- praptak 5y agoNot necessarily. It is speculated that the Devil can solve any mathematical problem and thus human crypto is useless to him, as he can just reverse all hashes, compute the discrete logarithms and factor arbitrarily large numbers. So an NFT (or any other cryptographic artifact) is rather something that Satan can offer you for your soul.
- alangibson 5y agoThat's not the way math works. G-d himself can't reverse a hash. Before you go invoking the "miracle" loophole, consider that miracles are logically impossible. If an impossible thing happens, then it was not in fact impossible. We just didn't understand the rules.
- ithinkso 5y agoThat's how maths works. Hashes are trivially reversible, all it takes is time, no miracle needed. Oracles in complexity theory are a bread and butter concept
- pjbeam 5y agoIf two different x can produce the same y information is lost on the hash transformation. Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_. That said, Laplace's Demon is, well, a demon. Presumably the devil can get the demon to unspool time to see what the input was and the math doesn't matter, collisions or not.
- ithinkso 5y agoIn cryptography either you only need 'an x', in cases that the original x does not matter, or if it does, then you can just as easily find all x of size less than large enough N and find 'the x', it is still solely restricted by time. Laplace's demon, information loss, Landauer's principle etc. are at most tangentially related to the problem discussed
- pjbeam 5y agoYou understand that isn't the same mathematically as reversing the hash? If you farm the set of all possible x and try them to see what works you do not have an inverse function in your hands.
- ithinkso 5y ago> If you farm the set of all possible x and try them to see what works you do not have an inverse function in your hands. I'm not sure I follow, what do I have then? Could you give me an example?
- Sebb767 5y ago> Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_. Not in all cases, but in the case of NFTs and other cryptocurrencies, it is. If a second private key fulfills all constraints of the original one (like size and all computed results so far), it is functionally equivalent to the original one.
- alangibson 5y agoIf hashes were trivially reversible, there'd be no cryptography. You're thinking of something like a rainbow table. Definitely not the same thing as rewinding a function that loses information.
- praptak 5y agoGod himself is omniscient, so He by definition knows all the reverses of all hashes. Also, to know the reverse of any hash you don't even need full omniscience, just "merely" the knowledge of anything that ever happened. Rewind the history of the universe, read the reverse from RAM when the hash was computed, done.
- anthk 5y agoIf God is omniscient, he can't do shit to punish you as he already knew you would commit a sin since the beginning of times.
- praptak 5y agoYes, the conflict of omniscience and free will is known in theology. I think they try to solve it by redefining omniscience to "being able to know everything but also being able to exclude stuff from one's knowledge".
- alangibson 5y agoThat's prior knowledge of the answer. Not the same thing as rewinding a trapdoor function. It's not very impressive if you already know the answer.
- dsr_ 5y agoThe omniscient one doesn't need to reverse a hash; they recognize immediately all possible values that could produce the hash.
- alangibson 5y agoSo God had access to a really big rainbow table. Not terribly impressive for the supposed creator of the universe.
- Jerrrry 5y agoYou are failing to grasp the notion that rainbow tables and knowing 51 factors to 17 and 3 are equivalent.
- true_religion 5y agoBack when I studied theology, the way we used to describe omniscience was to indicate that entities that exist outside of our universe can trivially see all points of our time stream. Thus the hypothetical devil need not reverse the hash, they just have to view its creation to know what it was created from.
- alangibson 5y agoAnything existing outside out universe would have no access to anything happening inside it by definition. If the could access it, they would have to be part of the universe system. How else could information be transferred.
- highspeedbus 5y agoGod is supernatural by definition. Anything we can compute, analyze and give logical meaning is just regular science.
- mbfg 5y agoFor a god to have value to humans, however, that god would have to interact in some way with the natural world. Those things can be detected by science.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mountainriver 5y agoPerhaps we should creat soulcoins which are a secure way of trading souls
- IIAOPSW 5y agoIts true. Instead of oracle calls, I use Faustian bargains.
- dkersten 5y agoI meant more human-to-human selling of your soul, as an alternative to selling on ebay. Doesn't even require you to believe in the supernatural.
- highspeedbus 5y agoThat's a running thing in my mind for years. The devil can do math. So It's an incredible lost opportunity when people are being possessed and we dont go and ask them some clever questions.
- anchpop 5y agohttps://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
- weare138 5y agoMoney made with math seems like something the Devil would be into.
- vmception 5y agoThe NFT standards need to be updated to include a hook that ensures royalties go to the creator upon transfer. Sadly this is currently impossible as the NFT doesn't store the amount of value it was traded for within it. But it could. For now, royalties only occur on third party platforms of NFTs.
- dkersten 5y agoSeems that they're doing just what they were intended to: proving ownership, nothing more. Having said that, yes, I think building a concept of royalties in would have been a good idea.