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The algorithm itself is public - the blog post has arXiv papers on it. People have shown themselves very willing to trust algorithms that are opaque (as in dif
by nostrademons 5y ago
The algorithm itself is public - the blog post has arXiv papers on it.
People have shown themselves very willing to trust algorithms that are opaque (as in difficult to understand) but auditable (by other people). Witness Bitcoin or Ethereum, where they will put their life savings into an algorithm. They're just not willing to trust organizations or people, where the organization can change the rules of the game at whim. (Even this has exceptions - ETH flourished over ETC despite doing a hard fork to rewrite history after the DAO hack.)
- sifar 5y ago>> The algorithm itself is public - the blog post has arXiv papers on it. This is misleading. The implementation (running on a phone) would not be and there is no way to verify.
- nostrademons 5y agoWhy not? The implication of this comment thread is that the implementation would not be Google's.
- skybrian 5y agoThe software and hardware supply chains need to be trusted. This would require more transparency than we get from Apple or Google. It’s doable, but who is going to do it? I don’t think people trusting cryptocurrency is much of an argument because cryptocurrency investors in general are a minority, and also, people do a lot of stupid things with cryptocurrency.