9 ms·

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 Eart

by 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.

by gojomo 5y ago

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.