16 ms·

Because I Am Bored

204 points by spfzero 5y ago

gojomo 5y ago
If you strip the envelope of crypto-hate, this is a really interesting idea to put transaction-validators on space-probes that are rapidly moving away from Earth. There, they can't be coerced by terrestrial bullies - be they 'authorities' or criminals – or enlisted into new cartels. They'll be running the same audited code for as long as they're in operation, unless later probes can outrace them. And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too! (Maybe ʻOumuamua was the leading edge of some other solar system's cryptominer cone?)
- wyager 5y ago
  It's an unworkable idea because: * Latency always increases * Satellites will fail due to radiation/solar panel degradation/distance from sun/etc. * Sending a missile fast is cheaper than sending a probe fast * There's no one on earth who is trustworthy enough to build these satellites without keeping the private keys
  - ta_666653467 5y ago
    As far as the keys go, you can design a secure enclave to do the crypto then ensure a design element is that it can't create the key without being in space. Perhaps it is only active when acceleration is below 0.1g. Or, maybe it's designed to burn out if used in atmospheric conditions outside the vacuum of space. There are plenty of ways i could see it working so that the keys are very secure. The rest of your points are a feature for deflationary currencies, and perhaps ensures no one currency lasts more than a few decades.
    - wyager 5y ago
      This is just kicking the can down the road - why would you trust e.g. Intel to do this correctly, without someone on the inside compromising the keys? The pressure to do so (financial, political, espionage-related, etc.) would be enormous.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28148409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28148409 EDIT: And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147525
    - rebuilder 5y ago
      So a trustless oracle? I really don’t think it’s simple at all. For starters, you have to assume the original creators of the project have backdoored their system in every way they possibly can.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        If we assume the code has been audited and that the "1,000 identical probes" idea mentioned above is implemented, then securely generating a random number is as easy as XORing the random numbers of a large enough group of mutually adversarial entities to guarantee that there isn't collusion between all of them.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >is below 0.1g below 0.1g for a minimum duration. otherwise, put it in the vomit-comet or similar to persuade the SE to generate the key.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > It's an unworkable idea because: > * Latency always increases Yeah, sure... Except that's the whole idea. A resource is perceived as more valuable the scarcer it is; making sure it gets ever more scarce is a way of insuring against it decreasing in value, or hopefully even insuring an increase instead. What you're saying is like: > Bitcoin is an unworkable idea because: > The difficulty of "mining" those magic numbers always increases
    - wyager 5y ago
      Except in this design, transaction verification always gets slower as well. Which makes the system less useful.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Sigh... You didn't understand the comment you replied to at all, did you? That's what makes the resource ever scarcer. It only makes the system "less useful" exactly as much as the ever harder-to-mine magic numbers make Bitcoin "less useful". Beats achieving the same goal by having to burn an ever larger fraction of the planet's energy.
        wyager 5y ago
        No, it’s clearly you who’s misunderstanding something. Presumably the satellites also perform the same chain-commit function as miners (otherwise there’s no point), meaning as the satellites get farther away, committing a transaction takes longer. Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time. You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. It does not. The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, which presumably should equilibrate at some point. It sounds like your model of Bitcoin mining is not correct.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        > Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time. How? Isn't the whole point of Satoshi's algorithm that those magic numbers it takes to commit a transaction are ever fewer and farther between? So -- given the same model and number of computers -- it takes ever longer to "mine" the next one? That is, by definition, getting slower. If you're arguing that they're still finding the same, eh, number of magic numbers per day, that's only because they're "compressing time" by throwing ever more and ever faster computers at it. The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics in stead of an algorithm, which AFAICS is pretty fucking genius. If your problem with that is "but then we can't beat the ever-increasing-scarcity algorithm by throwing ever more resources at the problem to keep up the speed!"... Well, then YTF use something based on ever-increasing scarcity in the first place? > You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. Well, no, not necessarily: If everyone just keeps their silly tokens where they are, I can see that it would take no energy at all. Not much of a "currency" then, though, if you can't actually do any trades with it, now is it? In practice, though: Yeah, that seems pretty much exactly what it has been requiring for all of its existence, and no end is in sight. > The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, Huh? So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago? Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then. If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money, and sure, those guys should be in jail -- but fortunately it's a million times safer now... What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now? > which presumably should equilibrate at some point. But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date? Within six months is precise enough... Unfortunately, the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago. So unless you can fix it so it goes back to where it was in, say, the third or fourth year by tomorrow, it's already so deep into unreasonable territory that shutting down the whole damn Ponzi scheme seems ever more like the only sensible thing to do, lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too! By that same argument, wouldn’t Bitcoin currently be directing economic effort towards producing electricity and computer hardware as fast and cheaply as possible?
  - rebuilder 5y ago
    Isn’t Bitcoin doing just that? Of course the hardware is pretty specialized. Unfortunately ”cheap” is not the same as ”ecological”.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      True, but the same goes for “planet-leaving tech.” Some of us might not be able to afford leaving the planet, or might want the planet’s environment to remain somewhat hospitable to life even after the CEOs leave in their spaceships!
      - acqq 5y ago
        Of course, "billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns" -- "when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons." https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape-to-space-while-the-world-burns/ https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape...
        gojomo 5y ago
        I'd not trust Salon to know what billionaires, or science/technology, will be able to do. Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away. Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Hey yeah! and maybe we can hire a bunch of aging seniors to validate by hand, and as their health dwindles we can see diminishing returns. Or the transaction fees can act as a pension in a fixed-size house of validator farms, which, since we're all getting collectively more stupid will on average itself have diminishing returns. I'm not sure we really need to be taking these things seriously.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Well, I think you just invented a fantastic use for Sudoku!
- soheil 5y ago
  > unless later probes can outrace them or if there is a secret backdoor or a 0-day that can be exploited from earth
- perihelions 5y ago
  >"unless later probes can outrace them" In the same way software-based cryptocurrencies are self-funding bug bounties, this proposal is a self-funding bounty for deep-space military hardware. (I believe the winner will be the $0.25 radio transmitter sufficient to jam a -150 dBm radio signal planet-wide).
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  I'm still confused about what advantage is gained by having the validator be a deep-space probe. How do we know whoever built/launched the probe didn't put in a back door, or can change the software by transmitting a special code, etc. Also what currency does the system use, if it's a new one how is it originally (fairly) issued to people?
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    The back door angle isn't hard to solve, just have the launchers manufacture 1,000 identical probes, then let the community randomly choose one to launch. The others can be checked for back doors. The launchers would have to balance the chance of getting caught against the chance of launching a clean probe, and the bigger the number the better the odds are on both sides.
    - scrumper 5y ago
      It does rather seem that the default answer with anything cryptocurrency is to waste vast amounts of energy with replication.
      - meowkit 5y ago
        Its called a tradeoff. There is this obsession with speed and efficiency in computing. The tradeoff for a secure decentralized system anyone can use and audit is that its slow and inefficient. There are real benefits to adopting systems like this for some tasks and problems we face - like transparency in political and economic systems.
        not2b 5y ago
        And this is an unacceptable tradeoff when we are facing a climate change crisis, unless the energy cost can be greatly reduced.
    - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
      Interesting idea. I was going to ask how we know they didn't perform some sleight of hand at the last moment with a secret 1,001st probe. But I guess if we can confirm that the private key is securely and randomly generated we can verify the validator's public key once it's in orbit. OK, let's do this.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Playing along: Which probes are the correct ones? Or is each its own cryptocurrency? What happens when satellites fail? How do you know that your transaction is being processed by a satellite and not something else? How do you know the private key is really only on the satellite? I'm failing to see the value of putting this hardware in space.
  - gojomo 5y ago
    They are launched with identity-keys which are, under proper processes, unique & secret. These are potentially rotated to new keys created off-world, early, so that even if unauthorized on-world keys remain, the window that those could be misused is small & early. Multiple probes contribute to the consensus validation of a single cryptocurrency. As satellites fail or move out of the practical distance in light-minutes, new ones take their place. (Or maybe, they're just put into long-orbits that keep them out of practical compromise range? CometCoin?)
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      Why is this better than having hardware on earth?
      - gojomo 5y ago
        Hardware on Earth can be compromised any time later - via coercion, inducements to collude, etc. The usual disadvantage of far-space probes – older tech that can't be upgraded – becomes an advantage in the trusted-validator role, as long as the initial prep/launch isn't corrupted. The window of potential compromises is shrunk.
        stickfigure 5y ago
        Software in space gets upgraded; the base stations the satellites communicate with can be compromised; you have to trust that the builders didn't include any backdoors or unexpected behavior (deliberately or accidentally). Seems like this has all the same problems as the earth option, but is more expensive.
- alex_young 5y ago
  OP called it a modest proposal. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    I'm fairly sure Mr Stross is erudite enough both to have done that on purpose and to not necessarily have meant it the same way Swift did.
- axus 5y ago
  I think probes can have firmware modified by upload, even the very far away ones.
  - gojomo 5y ago
    If that was a designed-in capability, sure. But these would be non-updatable.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    A sibling commenter said, only if that was the design. Heck they can launch with credit cards on board that have chips in them, those also have a private key, you give it some data, it returns a digital signature of this data, signed using a private key on-chip which can't be modified. It'll be a different use case for encryption, but I guess a unique signature is not guessable that one could use that as an encryption key...
- la6471 5y ago
  Solution in search of a problem. Let’s stop this nonsense.
wyager 5y ago
It's bewildering that so many people fail to get the "minimizing trust" aspect of Bitcoin; I do not trust anyone to successfully generate and hide (in space) super-secret private keys that might be worth trillions of dollars. Not to mention all the other obvious problems with this silly idea (What happens when the satellites stop working after 15 years because they got too far from the sun, or radiation fried their silicon?)
- DylanBohlender 5y ago
  I think people are so accustomed to having to trust each other that the notion of something being "trustless" is really foreign. If you tried to live a trustless life, you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, etc. - all of those things rely on implicit trust in other human beings. The whole of human society was built on trust!
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    Trustless people are in for a hard life. Trustless protocols are in for an easy one -- harder to game and verifiable as authentic.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Trustless protocols are still trusting the hardware, firmware, operating systems, compilers, software, maintainers…
      - maccolgan 5y ago
        All of that is at least auditable. You know what's not auditable or algorithmic? Literally everything else financial.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wyager 5y ago
    Oh great, then how about you implicitly trust me with your bank login info and email it to me? > you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, I look up my doctors' ratings before I use them. I don't fly sketchy third-world airlines with bad safety records. I don't buy food from grocery stores in places with bad food safety. "Trusted" and "trustless" are shorthand for the degree of system-external due diligence you need to do before having a sufficient degree of confidence.
bawolff 5y ago
The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness (yes im aware there are big caveats on that in reality) If you're ok trusting a specific entity, might as well just set up a mysql server. If you dont want to trust a central entity but are still ok with it existing as potential single point of failure, use chaum style digi-cash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash So if you're ok with this weird centralized on space x solution, you should be ok with a lot of other semi-centralized designs that solve all the same problems only better.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  > The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness The main reason most people like bitcoin is because of how much the value has appreciated. I would bet that the majority of holders of bitcoin don't actually care about whether it's decentralized or not.
  - gregschlom 5y ago
    Absolutely right. People care about Bitcoin because it's the get-rich-quick meme du jour. Most people couldn't care less about decentralization.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      For sure. Two easy checks on this: 1) Are other decentralized things seeing major adoption? 2) Does a cryptowhatever or blockchainwhatever hype target have to actually be decentralized? Or can it just talk about decentralization and carry on?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fleddr 5y ago
      Both statements are not mutually exclusive. I would agree most Bitcoin holders hold it only for financial returns, yet one of the core tenets of it likely/possibly going up in value is the decentralization itself, which enforces scarcity.
sarayourfriend 5y ago
Archived version since the site appears to be down: https://web.archive.org/web/20210629025413/https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210629025413/https://www.antip...
- CRConrad 5y ago
  What, it got slashdotted? ("hackernewsed" nowadays, I guess?) Must have been very temporary; I just successfully reloaded the page.
dublo7 5y ago
Imagine the first object from another civilization flies by Earth and it's just an off site backup.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  That would either be a godsend or a civilization-ending event!
  - soheil 5y ago
    or a poorly run extra terrestrial IT department
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      ET IT... I wonder if they still have bastard operators from hell?
      - dylan604 5y ago
        I wonder if they've developed any better diagnosis plans that "turn it off, then on again"?
        floatingatoll 5y ago
        Solar eclipses as chaos monkey events.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      “Hi, we’re from the Kribbofrishcozc civIT department, and we’re commandeering your sun to perform integrity tests of our backups.”
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    How would you even get the information out of it? It surely won't have USB? (Despite the claim of being universal). And will it be in Unicode? I guess one can use statistics to figure out their alphabet.. or alphabets, if they have several languages on this planet.
mgraczyk 5y ago
Obviously this is a joke, but the joke is based on a flawed premise. You could do the exact same thing on Earth without a satellite. The part he doesn't get is that cryptocurrencies are not solving the same problem as the space probe: > the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. Cryptocurrencies are solving the problem, who controls the dish? If this were real, we would see a race to the bottom with bigger and bigger dishes transmitting at higher and higher power, and it would be more damaging than Bitcoin.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  The premise is that it's accelerating fast away from earth, catching it would be hard. You don't get that on Earth. It's a bad idea, but it's not bad because you could do the same thing on earth.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway5752 5y ago
Complete trust is impossible and systems premised on it will be fundamentally flawed, no matter how stupidly (proof of work, space probes) we attempt to avoid that conclusion.
dirtyoldmick 5y ago
Nobody cares what you think.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Of course you need more than simply a signing infrastructure, you need to make sure that certain properties like not sending more than you have and no double spends are okay. To accomplish that most systems require storing the entire blockchain (I hope you've shipped enough hard drives with it!) [1] Then you either need to have zero bugs from the start or a way to update it. Then you also need to democratize access to the up & down link Then you need to make it robust to failure of that node... For all of the legitimate reasons to hate blockchains/cryptocurrencies fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it. If you are concerned about the waste that PoW creates then try to accelerate proof of stake and push for a carbon tax. [1]: There is a constant sized blockchain that recently came out, I'm not sure if it's actually viable, but it's an interesting proposition. https://minaprotocol.com/ https://minaprotocol.com/
- ineedasername 5y ago
  fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it. He posed it as a "modest proposal". [0] That pretty much guarantees that he did not intend it to be a serious or robustly presented option. Unless he actually enjoys eating Irish babies, which seems unlikely. (If you check out the story linked, it's important to know that it was written against the backdrop of a not-completely-passive bit of Irish genocide) [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
8jef 5y ago
I'm bored too. Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto. Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not. No more sleeping fortune being stashed. Why not do the same with corporations? Laws? States? Like a 50 years limit with forced liquidation at the end. Like for any life form: you born, you live, you die. Just imagine. What a dream. And because I'm that bored, another one: sandboxeing corporations. Do whatever you want within your shop, but only within your shop. People show for work, they can be treated as slaves if they want to. People get outside the sandbox no strings attached, the corporation has zero influence outside its own domain, and whatever happen outside the sandbox is public or owned by individuals only. That would be great for the environment. Boredom is a blessing.
- gary_0 5y ago
  > Why not have an expiry date on money? Because then it's not fungible, which means by some definitions it's not money. An "old" dollar whose time is running out would have less value than a "new" dollar, making transactions suddenly very complicated.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    The idea is not as crazy as it sounds. Some argue that as soon as central banks launch a digital dollar, said dollar becomes programmable. One major change is that effectively the central bank becomes the main bank for everybody, fully centralized. As such, they would have far more insight. And they can push money to you directly, like a stimulus, when needed. Yet also allow this money to have an expiry date, so you have to spend it before a certain date.
    - 8note 5y ago
      This expiry date is tied to it being in my account? Or just on the dollar? Why would anyone want to accept it, when it will be worthless next week?
      - fleddr 5y ago
dusted 5y ago
I'm also bored: Ban inheritance, money left in peoples accounts when they die should just vanish.
- spfzero 5y ago
  We already have trusts in case that ever happens.
- TheChaplain 5y ago
  No. Right now I'm not well off enough to buy my own home and I'm well above 30. If my kids or grandkids some day can buy their own home with my help, even if I've passed on, it gives me happiness and purpose.
  - 8jef 5y ago
    Dream on
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    In a world where inherited wealth isn't a thing, house prices and politics and enterprise are very different. It's hard to really know if your concerns would be meaningful in such a world or not. Inherited wealth is unearned wealth, and sure, it's nice to think about your kids having a little unearned wealth to make their lives better, but less nice to think about them competing with people with insane orders of magnitude more unearned wealth (and power) which is the actual world we're living in, and most likely a big part of why you can't afford to buy your own home.
- munificent 5y ago
  > Ban inheritance This is far too simplistic. My children are elementary school age. If I get killed in a car accident, it would be a second tragedy if I couldn't at least help provide for them until they reach adulthood from my savings. Instead, I think we should just have very progressive inheritance taxes. Taking care of offspring is one of the fundamental drivers of humanity, so we should all have some ability to do that. But large-scale multi-generational wealth consolidation is a driver of inequality and is bad for society. A progressive tax rate would balance those.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
I don't listen to the thoughts of anyone who can't make a blog that renders legibly on mobile. Expert in sci-fi != expert in literally anything else.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > I don't listen to the thoughts of anyone who can't make a blog that renders legibly on mobile. Oh, I'm fairly sure he could... If he wanted to.
asasidh 5y ago
one more "I just read about bitcoin and I am here to fix it."
- throwdecro 5y ago
  Makes more sense than "I just read about bitcoin and I am going to buy some."
- vidarh 5y ago
  I disagree with him quite strongly on crypto, but Charlie Stross have written about it for years - he's most certainly not "just" read about it.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
For context, the author (who lurks around here) is a sci-fi author who has some background in online banking (from the first dot-com boom!) His novels often feature aspects of economics, and in particular his novel Neptune's Brood [1] features a slower-than-light interstellar economy (and scam!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood
skybrian 5y ago
I'm under the vague impression that if you wanted to get in on Chia "farming" it's already too late. Anyone know if that's true? Is there still an effect on the SSD market? Conceptually, this can be thought of as generating Bingo cards (expensive, requires SSD's.) and playing Bingo (cheap, can be done with regular hard drives and a network connection). So many Bingo cards have been generated that there's probably not much point in generating more.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  My coworker has over a petabyte that isn't worth running. Its too late.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    I guess they could save it to tape and hope other people drop out eventually? Sort of like hanging onto baseball cards. Or Dogecoin.
mandmandam 5y ago
> PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. If that's a joke, I fail to see how it's funny ... It's wild to see such rabid hyperbole, lumping all decentralised currency into a single basket with child pornography (!!) go completely unremarked on. BTW the linked article from 2018 re India's "ban" talks about an order which was struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in March 2020.
- myhf 5y ago
  It's not a joke or hyperbole. Acts of hostility toward the entire earthbound population should be taken seriously.
  - randallsquared 5y ago
    It will be a while before the entire earthbound population is using cryptocurrencies, but I think it was hyperbole and that we should not take it seriously. /s
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  I don't know if you've read the latest IPCC report that just came out. But the state of the planet is approaching apocalyptic. Even with the most extreme measures, like cutting our net carbon output to 0 in just a handful of years we will have natural disasters that used to happen every 50 years, every 3-4 years now. And that's the optimistic scenario. It should be illegal to waste resources this way. All in the name of destabilizing the financial system.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    The problem is deciding what is waste. I think your gaming system is waste, therefore you should not be able to buy one. It has no important utility, given the catastrophe ahead. You can't just pick one thing you happen to dislike or find unimportant whilst at the same time listing your own waste as in fact being very much needed. The idea of mining being wasteful is of course a popular talking point for those not in crypto, yet the 100+ million owners of bitcoin would disagree and see it as the essential feature to secure the network. Further, the word "waste" needs far more nuance. Clearly, mining is highly energy intensive, yet that doesn't mean it has to be wasteful. Increasingly, mining is done using clean energy whilst also in particular seeking out stranded energy, which is not in competition with other uses.
SassyGrapefruit 5y ago
Anyone taking odds on whether author has a trenchcoat and samurai sword to accompany all this irrational crypto hate? Innovation is never perfect. Unix declared itself a multi user operating system but failed system calls used to crash the kernel for everyone. It has a design flaw boys I guess we screwed up when we didn't throw the whole thing in the trash.
blamestross 5y ago
I agree with everything Stross said here, but I don't think he characterized the speed-of-light verification mechanism well. He proposed it in his novel "Neptune's Brood" in 2013 and it is described in some more detail here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210514225451/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210514225451/http://www.antipo... (original at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-she... but the site is dying) I think it merits some formal consideration, a scifi novel isn't a whitepaper, but I think the concept has promise. You can't cheat the speed of light without finding a few jupiters worth of exotic matter.
raldi 5y ago
Another function of these probes could be crypto time capsules. For instance, years ago Google implemented an internal policy of deleting all company email after something like 90 days. This included all the ancient ones, which would have been invaluable to historians one day. A sad destruction of a trove of history. With a space probe flying out of the solar system, they could've encrypted all the old mail with a public key whose pair was on the probe, and then 100 years from now, the probe could be programmed to transmit the private key back to earth.
- ciupicri 5y ago
  Do you have more details on Google's internal policy?
weavejester 5y ago
I'm quite not sure I understand the point here. Sure, by putting the hardware in outer space you make it harder to access, and if you boost it away from the solar system you can guarantee it would be cost prohibitive to catch up to it - but the physical security of monetary systems is rarely the problem. The main problem that any currency faces is why should anyone place any trust in it? Why does it provide a reliable record of wealth transfer? If it's a probe that Elon Musk has sent off, then you're asking me to trust Elon and his company. Will the hardware function correctly? Will the software? Is it free of accidental exploits or deliberate back doors? How much wealth am I prepared to wager on this? For all Bitcoin's flaws, it does have a robust trust infrastructure. You trust the processing-majority of miners, who have only become the majority because they have made a significant investment in the fidelity of the system. Their wealth (at least in theory) is tied to upholding an honest transaction record. Would Elon or SpaceX lose money if it turned out their interplanetary server was defective? Sure, but they'd only lose the cost of producing the probe and boosting it into space. If it costs $10 billion to do so, and Elon makes $11 billion from it before a flaw is discovered, then from a financial standpoint it's a still a success. Ideally a currency should be backed by a number of independent actors, whose stake scales with the currency's value.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
>And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. [citation needed]
ggreer 5y ago
IIRC, Stross learned about Bitcoin in 2011 when doing research for Neptune's Brood. Had he hedged his bets and bought $20 of Bitcoin before writing posts like "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire"[1], he'd be a multimillionaire today. At some point in the past decade, Stross went mad. He's become consumed by dogmatism and doomsaying. He constantly predicts disaster, and he's constantly wrong. Here are a few examples. He thought that Brexit would destroy the UK[2]: > I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s). He canceled visits to the US because thought that Trump would become a totalitarian dictator[3]: > In which case, for me to continue to plan to travel to the United States in eight months time would be as unwise as it would have been to plan in February 1933 to travel to Germany in September of that year: it might be survivable, but it would nevertheless be hazardous. Here's a snippet from his 2018 retrospective[4]: > 2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps. 2018 was also, by no coincidence whatsoever, the year in which the global neo-Nazi movement made considerable headway, with neo-fascist demagogues grabbing power in Brazil, tightening their stranglehold in India, the Philippines, Turkey, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. The UK was, for a third consecutive year, paralyzed by the utter shit-show that is Brexit, with the deadline now looming less than 100 days ahead of us. No matter how many times reality contradicts his views, he refuses to change his mind. Even in December he was predicting Brexit catastrophes.[5] Moreover, his writing style has become snide and dismissive. At first the transition saddened me, but now I just find it annoying. 1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w... 2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of... 3. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/01/policy-change-future-us-visits.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/01/policy-... 4. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/12/crawling-from-the-wreckage.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/12/crawlin... 5. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-say-you-want-a-revoluti.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
wayeq 5y ago
oldmenyellingatclouds.ycombinator.com seriously if most of you were your current age in the early 90s you'd be bitching about how the internet consumes telephone lines and is no improvement over mail and face to face communication.
snappy173 5y ago
We are trying to create scarcity. This is literally the opposite of the Star Trek economy. We are so fucked …
musesum 5y ago
Was intrigued, yet somewhat disappointed, after reading Stross's post as I've read Accelerando several times. Some thoughts: > It's also horribly energy-inefficient Yep, here are some comparative carbon costs: US Military: 59 M Tons 2017. BTC: 22 M tons 2018, 37 M tons 2021, 130 M tons by 2024 predicted in China before shutdown, Banks: 1040 M tons IMO, the idea of a $1,000,000 BTC would be a huge hit on reducing CO2, as cost of mining approaches BTC price. > Hork up a bunch of space probes Here is a variation on that idea: One of the claimed advantages to satellite is lower latency (see https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm) Solana is claiming layer 1 blocktime of 400ms by synchronizing clocks. For Global coverage, I think satellite is a requirement to achieve that throughput as consumer latency is at least double that. This isn't proof of work; Solana calls its method proof of history. IMO, PoW is the like the Cray Supercomputer of the 80's. My Apple Watch is lot more powerful at -let's see- 1/64,000,000th the cost.
- spiralx 5y ago
  > US Military: 59 M ... Banks: 1040 M tons I have no idea where you got these numbers from, but the idea that banks produce 17 times as much CO2 as the entire US military - with all of its fossil fuel-burning vehicles - is obviously ridiculous.
  - musesum 5y ago
    citations: USMilitary 59 M Tons 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report-the-u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-many-industrialized-nations-infographic/?sh=37a99774372f https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report... BTC: 37M M tons - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor... BTC: 130 M tons China - https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in-china-will-hit-130-million-tons-by-2024/fulltext#:~:text=Bitcoin%20Mining%20Emissions%20in%20China%20Will%20Hit%20130%20Million%20Tons%20by%202024,-By%20New%20Scientist&text=Researchers%20at%20China's%20Tsinghua%20University,emissions%20from%20China's%20electricity%20generation https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in.... Banks: 1040 M tons - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-produce-700-times-more-emissions-from-loans-than-offices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-pro...
villgax 5y ago
SC of India already reversed the ban on crypto. The author couldn't be bothered to research before making half-baked remarks

204 points by spfzero 5y ago

If you strip the envelope of crypto-hate, this is a really interesting idea to put transaction-validators on space-probes that are rapidly moving away from Earth. There, they can't be coerced by terrestrial bullies - be they 'authorities' or criminals – or enlisted into new cartels. They'll be running the same audited code for as long as they're in operation, unless later probes can outrace them. And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too! (Maybe ʻOumuamua was the leading edge of some other solar system's cryptominer cone?)

wyager 5y ago
It's an unworkable idea because: * Latency always increases * Satellites will fail due to radiation/solar panel degradation/distance from sun/etc. * Sending a missile fast is cheaper than sending a probe fast * There's no one on earth who is trustworthy enough to build these satellites without keeping the private keys
- ta_666653467 5y ago
  As far as the keys go, you can design a secure enclave to do the crypto then ensure a design element is that it can't create the key without being in space. Perhaps it is only active when acceleration is below 0.1g. Or, maybe it's designed to burn out if used in atmospheric conditions outside the vacuum of space. There are plenty of ways i could see it working so that the keys are very secure. The rest of your points are a feature for deflationary currencies, and perhaps ensures no one currency lasts more than a few decades.
  - wyager 5y ago
    This is just kicking the can down the road - why would you trust e.g. Intel to do this correctly, without someone on the inside compromising the keys? The pressure to do so (financial, political, espionage-related, etc.) would be enormous.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28148409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28148409 EDIT: And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147525
  - rebuilder 5y ago
    So a trustless oracle? I really don’t think it’s simple at all. For starters, you have to assume the original creators of the project have backdoored their system in every way they possibly can.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      If we assume the code has been audited and that the "1,000 identical probes" idea mentioned above is implemented, then securely generating a random number is as easy as XORing the random numbers of a large enough group of mutually adversarial entities to guarantee that there isn't collusion between all of them.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >is below 0.1g below 0.1g for a minimum duration. otherwise, put it in the vomit-comet or similar to persuade the SE to generate the key.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > It's an unworkable idea because: > * Latency always increases Yeah, sure... Except that's the whole idea. A resource is perceived as more valuable the scarcer it is; making sure it gets ever more scarce is a way of insuring against it decreasing in value, or hopefully even insuring an increase instead. What you're saying is like: > Bitcoin is an unworkable idea because: > The difficulty of "mining" those magic numbers always increases
  - wyager 5y ago
    Except in this design, transaction verification always gets slower as well. Which makes the system less useful.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Sigh... You didn't understand the comment you replied to at all, did you? That's what makes the resource ever scarcer. It only makes the system "less useful" exactly as much as the ever harder-to-mine magic numbers make Bitcoin "less useful". Beats achieving the same goal by having to burn an ever larger fraction of the planet's energy.
      - wyager 5y ago
        No, it’s clearly you who’s misunderstanding something. Presumably the satellites also perform the same chain-commit function as miners (otherwise there’s no point), meaning as the satellites get farther away, committing a transaction takes longer. Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time. You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. It does not. The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, which presumably should equilibrate at some point. It sounds like your model of Bitcoin mining is not correct.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        > Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time. How? Isn't the whole point of Satoshi's algorithm that those magic numbers it takes to commit a transaction are ever fewer and farther between? So -- given the same model and number of computers -- it takes ever longer to "mine" the next one? That is, by definition, getting slower. If you're arguing that they're still finding the same, eh, number of magic numbers per day, that's only because they're "compressing time" by throwing ever more and ever faster computers at it. The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics in stead of an algorithm, which AFAICS is pretty fucking genius. If your problem with that is "but then we can't beat the ever-increasing-scarcity algorithm by throwing ever more resources at the problem to keep up the speed!"... Well, then YTF use something based on ever-increasing scarcity in the first place? > You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. Well, no, not necessarily: If everyone just keeps their silly tokens where they are, I can see that it would take no energy at all. Not much of a "currency" then, though, if you can't actually do any trades with it, now is it? In practice, though: Yeah, that seems pretty much exactly what it has been requiring for all of its existence, and no end is in sight. > The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, Huh? So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago? Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then. If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money, and sure, those guys should be in jail -- but fortunately it's a million times safer now... What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now? > which presumably should equilibrate at some point. But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date? Within six months is precise enough... Unfortunately, the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago. So unless you can fix it so it goes back to where it was in, say, the third or fourth year by tomorrow, it's already so deep into unreasonable territory that shutting down the whole damn Ponzi scheme seems ever more like the only sensible thing to do, lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
tshaddox 5y ago
> And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too! By that same argument, wouldn’t Bitcoin currently be directing economic effort towards producing electricity and computer hardware as fast and cheaply as possible?
- rebuilder 5y ago
  Isn’t Bitcoin doing just that? Of course the hardware is pretty specialized. Unfortunately ”cheap” is not the same as ”ecological”.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    True, but the same goes for “planet-leaving tech.” Some of us might not be able to afford leaving the planet, or might want the planet’s environment to remain somewhat hospitable to life even after the CEOs leave in their spaceships!
    - acqq 5y ago
      Of course, "billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns" -- "when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons." https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape-to-space-while-the-world-burns/ https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape...
      - gojomo 5y ago
        I'd not trust Salon to know what billionaires, or science/technology, will be able to do. Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away. Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.
jvanderbot 5y ago
Hey yeah! and maybe we can hire a bunch of aging seniors to validate by hand, and as their health dwindles we can see diminishing returns. Or the transaction fees can act as a pension in a fixed-size house of validator farms, which, since we're all getting collectively more stupid will on average itself have diminishing returns. I'm not sure we really need to be taking these things seriously.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Well, I think you just invented a fantastic use for Sudoku!
soheil 5y ago
> unless later probes can outrace them or if there is a secret backdoor or a 0-day that can be exploited from earth
perihelions 5y ago
>"unless later probes can outrace them" In the same way software-based cryptocurrencies are self-funding bug bounties, this proposal is a self-funding bounty for deep-space military hardware. (I believe the winner will be the $0.25 radio transmitter sufficient to jam a -150 dBm radio signal planet-wide).
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
I'm still confused about what advantage is gained by having the validator be a deep-space probe. How do we know whoever built/launched the probe didn't put in a back door, or can change the software by transmitting a special code, etc. Also what currency does the system use, if it's a new one how is it originally (fairly) issued to people?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The back door angle isn't hard to solve, just have the launchers manufacture 1,000 identical probes, then let the community randomly choose one to launch. The others can be checked for back doors. The launchers would have to balance the chance of getting caught against the chance of launching a clean probe, and the bigger the number the better the odds are on both sides.
  - scrumper 5y ago
    It does rather seem that the default answer with anything cryptocurrency is to waste vast amounts of energy with replication.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Its called a tradeoff. There is this obsession with speed and efficiency in computing. The tradeoff for a secure decentralized system anyone can use and audit is that its slow and inefficient. There are real benefits to adopting systems like this for some tasks and problems we face - like transparency in political and economic systems.
      - not2b 5y ago
        And this is an unacceptable tradeoff when we are facing a climate change crisis, unless the energy cost can be greatly reduced.
  - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
    Interesting idea. I was going to ask how we know they didn't perform some sleight of hand at the last moment with a secret 1,001st probe. But I guess if we can confirm that the private key is securely and randomly generated we can verify the validator's public key once it's in orbit. OK, let's do this.
stickfigure 5y ago
Playing along: Which probes are the correct ones? Or is each its own cryptocurrency? What happens when satellites fail? How do you know that your transaction is being processed by a satellite and not something else? How do you know the private key is really only on the satellite? I'm failing to see the value of putting this hardware in space.
- gojomo 5y ago
  They are launched with identity-keys which are, under proper processes, unique & secret. These are potentially rotated to new keys created off-world, early, so that even if unauthorized on-world keys remain, the window that those could be misused is small & early. Multiple probes contribute to the consensus validation of a single cryptocurrency. As satellites fail or move out of the practical distance in light-minutes, new ones take their place. (Or maybe, they're just put into long-orbits that keep them out of practical compromise range? CometCoin?)
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Why is this better than having hardware on earth?
    - gojomo 5y ago
      Hardware on Earth can be compromised any time later - via coercion, inducements to collude, etc. The usual disadvantage of far-space probes – older tech that can't be upgraded – becomes an advantage in the trusted-validator role, as long as the initial prep/launch isn't corrupted. The window of potential compromises is shrunk.
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        Software in space gets upgraded; the base stations the satellites communicate with can be compromised; you have to trust that the builders didn't include any backdoors or unexpected behavior (deliberately or accidentally). Seems like this has all the same problems as the earth option, but is more expensive.
alex_young 5y ago
OP called it a modest proposal. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
- CRConrad 5y ago
  I'm fairly sure Mr Stross is erudite enough both to have done that on purpose and to not necessarily have meant it the same way Swift did.
axus 5y ago
I think probes can have firmware modified by upload, even the very far away ones.
- gojomo 5y ago
  If that was a designed-in capability, sure. But these would be non-updatable.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  A sibling commenter said, only if that was the design. Heck they can launch with credit cards on board that have chips in them, those also have a private key, you give it some data, it returns a digital signature of this data, signed using a private key on-chip which can't be modified. It'll be a different use case for encryption, but I guess a unique signature is not guessable that one could use that as an encryption key...
la6471 5y ago
Solution in search of a problem. Let’s stop this nonsense.

wyager 5y ago

It's bewildering that so many people fail to get the "minimizing trust" aspect of Bitcoin; I do not trust anyone to successfully generate and hide (in space) super-secret private keys that might be worth trillions of dollars. Not to mention all the other obvious problems with this silly idea (What happens when the satellites stop working after 15 years because they got too far from the sun, or radiation fried their silicon?)

DylanBohlender 5y ago
I think people are so accustomed to having to trust each other that the notion of something being "trustless" is really foreign. If you tried to live a trustless life, you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, etc. - all of those things rely on implicit trust in other human beings. The whole of human society was built on trust!
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Trustless people are in for a hard life. Trustless protocols are in for an easy one -- harder to game and verifiable as authentic.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Trustless protocols are still trusting the hardware, firmware, operating systems, compilers, software, maintainers…
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      All of that is at least auditable. You know what's not auditable or algorithmic? Literally everything else financial.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wyager 5y ago
  Oh great, then how about you implicitly trust me with your bank login info and email it to me? > you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, I look up my doctors' ratings before I use them. I don't fly sketchy third-world airlines with bad safety records. I don't buy food from grocery stores in places with bad food safety. "Trusted" and "trustless" are shorthand for the degree of system-external due diligence you need to do before having a sufficient degree of confidence.

bawolff 5y ago

The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness (yes im aware there are big caveats on that in reality) If you're ok trusting a specific entity, might as well just set up a mysql server. If you dont want to trust a central entity but are still ok with it existing as potential single point of failure, use chaum style digi-cash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash So if you're ok with this weird centralized on space x solution, you should be ok with a lot of other semi-centralized designs that solve all the same problems only better.

Trasmatta 5y ago
> The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness The main reason most people like bitcoin is because of how much the value has appreciated. I would bet that the majority of holders of bitcoin don't actually care about whether it's decentralized or not.
- gregschlom 5y ago
  Absolutely right. People care about Bitcoin because it's the get-rich-quick meme du jour. Most people couldn't care less about decentralization.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    For sure. Two easy checks on this: 1) Are other decentralized things seeing major adoption? 2) Does a cryptowhatever or blockchainwhatever hype target have to actually be decentralized? Or can it just talk about decentralization and carry on?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Both statements are not mutually exclusive. I would agree most Bitcoin holders hold it only for financial returns, yet one of the core tenets of it likely/possibly going up in value is the decentralization itself, which enforces scarcity.

sarayourfriend 5y ago

Archived version since the site appears to be down: https://web.archive.org/web/20210629025413/https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210629025413/https://www.antip...

CRConrad 5y ago
What, it got slashdotted? ("hackernewsed" nowadays, I guess?) Must have been very temporary; I just successfully reloaded the page.

dublo7 5y ago

Imagine the first object from another civilization flies by Earth and it's just an off site backup.

floatingatoll 5y ago
That would either be a godsend or a civilization-ending event!
- soheil 5y ago
  or a poorly run extra terrestrial IT department
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    ET IT... I wonder if they still have bastard operators from hell?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I wonder if they've developed any better diagnosis plans that "turn it off, then on again"?
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        Solar eclipses as chaos monkey events.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    “Hi, we’re from the Kribbofrishcozc civIT department, and we’re commandeering your sun to perform integrity tests of our backups.”
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  How would you even get the information out of it? It surely won't have USB? (Despite the claim of being universal). And will it be in Unicode? I guess one can use statistics to figure out their alphabet.. or alphabets, if they have several languages on this planet.

mgraczyk 5y ago

Obviously this is a joke, but the joke is based on a flawed premise. You could do the exact same thing on Earth without a satellite. The part he doesn't get is that cryptocurrencies are not solving the same problem as the space probe: > the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes. Cryptocurrencies are solving the problem, who controls the dish? If this were real, we would see a race to the bottom with bigger and bigger dishes transmitting at higher and higher power, and it would be more damaging than Bitcoin.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
The premise is that it's accelerating fast away from earth, catching it would be hard. You don't get that on Earth. It's a bad idea, but it's not bad because you could do the same thing on earth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway5752 5y ago

Complete trust is impossible and systems premised on it will be fundamentally flawed, no matter how stupidly (proof of work, space probes) we attempt to avoid that conclusion.

dirtyoldmick 5y ago

Nobody cares what you think.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

Of course you need more than simply a signing infrastructure, you need to make sure that certain properties like not sending more than you have and no double spends are okay. To accomplish that most systems require storing the entire blockchain (I hope you've shipped enough hard drives with it!) [1] Then you either need to have zero bugs from the start or a way to update it. Then you also need to democratize access to the up & down link Then you need to make it robust to failure of that node... For all of the legitimate reasons to hate blockchains/cryptocurrencies fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it. If you are concerned about the waste that PoW creates then try to accelerate proof of stake and push for a carbon tax. [1]: There is a constant sized blockchain that recently came out, I'm not sure if it's actually viable, but it's an interesting proposition. https://minaprotocol.com/ https://minaprotocol.com/

ineedasername 5y ago
fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it. He posed it as a "modest proposal". [0] That pretty much guarantees that he did not intend it to be a serious or robustly presented option. Unless he actually enjoys eating Irish babies, which seems unlikely. (If you check out the story linked, it's important to know that it was written against the backdrop of a not-completely-passive bit of Irish genocide) [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

8jef 5y ago

I'm bored too. Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto. Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not. No more sleeping fortune being stashed. Why not do the same with corporations? Laws? States? Like a 50 years limit with forced liquidation at the end. Like for any life form: you born, you live, you die. Just imagine. What a dream. And because I'm that bored, another one: sandboxeing corporations. Do whatever you want within your shop, but only within your shop. People show for work, they can be treated as slaves if they want to. People get outside the sandbox no strings attached, the corporation has zero influence outside its own domain, and whatever happen outside the sandbox is public or owned by individuals only. That would be great for the environment. Boredom is a blessing.

gary_0 5y ago
> Why not have an expiry date on money? Because then it's not fungible, which means by some definitions it's not money. An "old" dollar whose time is running out would have less value than a "new" dollar, making transactions suddenly very complicated.
- fleddr 5y ago
  The idea is not as crazy as it sounds. Some argue that as soon as central banks launch a digital dollar, said dollar becomes programmable. One major change is that effectively the central bank becomes the main bank for everybody, fully centralized. As such, they would have far more insight. And they can push money to you directly, like a stimulus, when needed. Yet also allow this money to have an expiry date, so you have to spend it before a certain date.
  - 8note 5y ago
    This expiry date is tied to it being in my account? Or just on the dollar? Why would anyone want to accept it, when it will be worthless next week?
    - fleddr 5y ago

dusted 5y ago

I'm also bored: Ban inheritance, money left in peoples accounts when they die should just vanish.

spfzero 5y ago
We already have trusts in case that ever happens.
TheChaplain 5y ago
No. Right now I'm not well off enough to buy my own home and I'm well above 30. If my kids or grandkids some day can buy their own home with my help, even if I've passed on, it gives me happiness and purpose.
- 8jef 5y ago
  Dream on
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  In a world where inherited wealth isn't a thing, house prices and politics and enterprise are very different. It's hard to really know if your concerns would be meaningful in such a world or not. Inherited wealth is unearned wealth, and sure, it's nice to think about your kids having a little unearned wealth to make their lives better, but less nice to think about them competing with people with insane orders of magnitude more unearned wealth (and power) which is the actual world we're living in, and most likely a big part of why you can't afford to buy your own home.
munificent 5y ago
> Ban inheritance This is far too simplistic. My children are elementary school age. If I get killed in a car accident, it would be a second tragedy if I couldn't at least help provide for them until they reach adulthood from my savings. Instead, I think we should just have very progressive inheritance taxes. Taking care of offspring is one of the fundamental drivers of humanity, so we should all have some ability to do that. But large-scale multi-generational wealth consolidation is a driver of inequality and is bad for society. A progressive tax rate would balance those.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

I don't listen to the thoughts of anyone who can't make a blog that renders legibly on mobile. Expert in sci-fi != expert in literally anything else.

CRConrad 5y ago
> I don't listen to the thoughts of anyone who can't make a blog that renders legibly on mobile. Oh, I'm fairly sure he could... If he wanted to.

asasidh 5y ago

one more "I just read about bitcoin and I am here to fix it."

throwdecro 5y ago
Makes more sense than "I just read about bitcoin and I am going to buy some."
vidarh 5y ago
I disagree with him quite strongly on crypto, but Charlie Stross have written about it for years - he's most certainly not "just" read about it.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

For context, the author (who lurks around here) is a sci-fi author who has some background in online banking (from the first dot-com boom!) His novels often feature aspects of economics, and in particular his novel Neptune's Brood [1] features a slower-than-light interstellar economy (and scam!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood

skybrian 5y ago

I'm under the vague impression that if you wanted to get in on Chia "farming" it's already too late. Anyone know if that's true? Is there still an effect on the SSD market? Conceptually, this can be thought of as generating Bingo cards (expensive, requires SSD's.) and playing Bingo (cheap, can be done with regular hard drives and a network connection). So many Bingo cards have been generated that there's probably not much point in generating more.

tofuahdude 5y ago
My coworker has over a petabyte that isn't worth running. Its too late.
- skybrian 5y ago
  I guess they could save it to tape and hope other people drop out eventually? Sort of like hanging onto baseball cards. Or Dogecoin.

mandmandam 5y ago

> PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route. If that's a joke, I fail to see how it's funny ... It's wild to see such rabid hyperbole, lumping all decentralised currency into a single basket with child pornography (!!) go completely unremarked on. BTW the linked article from 2018 re India's "ban" talks about an order which was struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in March 2020.

myhf 5y ago
It's not a joke or hyperbole. Acts of hostility toward the entire earthbound population should be taken seriously.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  It will be a while before the entire earthbound population is using cryptocurrencies, but I think it was hyperbole and that we should not take it seriously. /s
light_hue_1 5y ago
I don't know if you've read the latest IPCC report that just came out. But the state of the planet is approaching apocalyptic. Even with the most extreme measures, like cutting our net carbon output to 0 in just a handful of years we will have natural disasters that used to happen every 50 years, every 3-4 years now. And that's the optimistic scenario. It should be illegal to waste resources this way. All in the name of destabilizing the financial system.
- fleddr 5y ago
  The problem is deciding what is waste. I think your gaming system is waste, therefore you should not be able to buy one. It has no important utility, given the catastrophe ahead. You can't just pick one thing you happen to dislike or find unimportant whilst at the same time listing your own waste as in fact being very much needed. The idea of mining being wasteful is of course a popular talking point for those not in crypto, yet the 100+ million owners of bitcoin would disagree and see it as the essential feature to secure the network. Further, the word "waste" needs far more nuance. Clearly, mining is highly energy intensive, yet that doesn't mean it has to be wasteful. Increasingly, mining is done using clean energy whilst also in particular seeking out stranded energy, which is not in competition with other uses.

SassyGrapefruit 5y ago

Anyone taking odds on whether author has a trenchcoat and samurai sword to accompany all this irrational crypto hate? Innovation is never perfect. Unix declared itself a multi user operating system but failed system calls used to crash the kernel for everyone. It has a design flaw boys I guess we screwed up when we didn't throw the whole thing in the trash.

blamestross 5y ago

I agree with everything Stross said here, but I don't think he characterized the speed-of-light verification mechanism well. He proposed it in his novel "Neptune's Brood" in 2013 and it is described in some more detail here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210514225451/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210514225451/http://www.antipo... (original at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-she... but the site is dying) I think it merits some formal consideration, a scifi novel isn't a whitepaper, but I think the concept has promise. You can't cheat the speed of light without finding a few jupiters worth of exotic matter.

raldi 5y ago

Another function of these probes could be crypto time capsules. For instance, years ago Google implemented an internal policy of deleting all company email after something like 90 days. This included all the ancient ones, which would have been invaluable to historians one day. A sad destruction of a trove of history. With a space probe flying out of the solar system, they could've encrypted all the old mail with a public key whose pair was on the probe, and then 100 years from now, the probe could be programmed to transmit the private key back to earth.

ciupicri 5y ago
Do you have more details on Google's internal policy?

weavejester 5y ago

I'm quite not sure I understand the point here. Sure, by putting the hardware in outer space you make it harder to access, and if you boost it away from the solar system you can guarantee it would be cost prohibitive to catch up to it - but the physical security of monetary systems is rarely the problem. The main problem that any currency faces is why should anyone place any trust in it? Why does it provide a reliable record of wealth transfer? If it's a probe that Elon Musk has sent off, then you're asking me to trust Elon and his company. Will the hardware function correctly? Will the software? Is it free of accidental exploits or deliberate back doors? How much wealth am I prepared to wager on this? For all Bitcoin's flaws, it does have a robust trust infrastructure. You trust the processing-majority of miners, who have only become the majority because they have made a significant investment in the fidelity of the system. Their wealth (at least in theory) is tied to upholding an honest transaction record. Would Elon or SpaceX lose money if it turned out their interplanetary server was defective? Sure, but they'd only lose the cost of producing the probe and boosting it into space. If it costs $10 billion to do so, and Elon makes $11 billion from it before a flaw is discovered, then from a financial standpoint it's a still a success. Ideally a currency should be backed by a number of independent actors, whose stake scales with the currency's value.

chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago

>And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering. [citation needed]

ggreer 5y ago

IIRC, Stross learned about Bitcoin in 2011 when doing research for Neptune's Brood. Had he hedged his bets and bought $20 of Bitcoin before writing posts like "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire"[1], he'd be a multimillionaire today. At some point in the past decade, Stross went mad. He's become consumed by dogmatism and doomsaying. He constantly predicts disaster, and he's constantly wrong. Here are a few examples. He thought that Brexit would destroy the UK[2]: > I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s). He canceled visits to the US because thought that Trump would become a totalitarian dictator[3]: > In which case, for me to continue to plan to travel to the United States in eight months time would be as unwise as it would have been to plan in February 1933 to travel to Germany in September of that year: it might be survivable, but it would nevertheless be hazardous. Here's a snippet from his 2018 retrospective[4]: > 2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps. 2018 was also, by no coincidence whatsoever, the year in which the global neo-Nazi movement made considerable headway, with neo-fascist demagogues grabbing power in Brazil, tightening their stranglehold in India, the Philippines, Turkey, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. The UK was, for a third consecutive year, paralyzed by the utter shit-show that is Brexit, with the deadline now looming less than 100 days ahead of us. No matter how many times reality contradicts his views, he refuses to change his mind. Even in December he was predicting Brexit catastrophes.[5] Moreover, his writing style has become snide and dismissive. At first the transition saddened me, but now I just find it annoying. 1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w... 2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of... 3. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/01/policy-change-future-us-visits.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/01/policy-... 4. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/12/crawling-from-the-wreckage.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/12/crawlin... 5. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-say-you-want-a-revoluti.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

wayeq 5y ago

oldmenyellingatclouds.ycombinator.com seriously if most of you were your current age in the early 90s you'd be bitching about how the internet consumes telephone lines and is no improvement over mail and face to face communication.

snappy173 5y ago

We are trying to create scarcity. This is literally the opposite of the Star Trek economy. We are so fucked …

musesum 5y ago

Was intrigued, yet somewhat disappointed, after reading Stross's post as I've read Accelerando several times. Some thoughts: > It's also horribly energy-inefficient Yep, here are some comparative carbon costs: US Military: 59 M Tons 2017. BTC: 22 M tons 2018, 37 M tons 2021, 130 M tons by 2024 predicted in China before shutdown, Banks: 1040 M tons IMO, the idea of a $1,000,000 BTC would be a huge hit on reducing CO2, as cost of mining approaches BTC price. > Hork up a bunch of space probes Here is a variation on that idea: One of the claimed advantages to satellite is lower latency (see https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm) Solana is claiming layer 1 blocktime of 400ms by synchronizing clocks. For Global coverage, I think satellite is a requirement to achieve that throughput as consumer latency is at least double that. This isn't proof of work; Solana calls its method proof of history. IMO, PoW is the like the Cray Supercomputer of the 80's. My Apple Watch is lot more powerful at -let's see- 1/64,000,000th the cost.

spiralx 5y ago
> US Military: 59 M ... Banks: 1040 M tons I have no idea where you got these numbers from, but the idea that banks produce 17 times as much CO2 as the entire US military - with all of its fossil fuel-burning vehicles - is obviously ridiculous.
- musesum 5y ago
  citations: USMilitary 59 M Tons 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report-the-u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-many-industrialized-nations-infographic/?sh=37a99774372f https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report... BTC: 37M M tons - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor... BTC: 130 M tons China - https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in-china-will-hit-130-million-tons-by-2024/fulltext#:~:text=Bitcoin%20Mining%20Emissions%20in%20China%20Will%20Hit%20130%20Million%20Tons%20by%202024,-By%20New%20Scientist&text=Researchers%20at%20China's%20Tsinghua%20University,emissions%20from%20China's%20electricity%20generation https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in.... Banks: 1040 M tons - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-produce-700-times-more-emissions-from-loans-than-offices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-pro...

villgax 5y ago

SC of India already reversed the ban on crypto. The author couldn't be bothered to research before making half-baked remarks