5 ms·

Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. It does so by making certain trade-offs such as an en

Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. It does so by making certain trade-offs such as an energy-intensive verification process. This is a very valid use-case when you need to transact against the will of a powerful adversary such as governments. It needs to be there and needs to be protected just like free speech needs to be protected. However, day-to-day, if you're making transactions that the government approves of, it's better and more convenient to rely on said government to protect you and end up using a much more efficient (in terms of transactions per second, fees & energy usage) and convenient system such as credit cards. Crypto is like a tank - useful if you need to go into battle and defend yourself, and while it can be used to go buy groceries at the mall, it's not the most convenient. When you're not in battle, you're better off just using a normal car and relying on local laws and subsequent enforcement to deter anyone from harming you, which, at least in civilized countries, works the majority of the time.

callamdelaney 5y ago
It’s 2022 - nobody cares about free speech or freedom.
- OrlandoHakim 5y ago
  In 2022 some may also care about a truly scarce digital store of value in a time of unprecedented inflation. Speaking about Bitcoin, not altcoins.
- aeternum 5y ago
  I care
- tormock 5y ago
  you forgot privacy... (i.e.: Monero, Zcash, etc)
roenxi 5y ago
Also, note that "take their stuff through extra-legal means" has become an uncomfortably common strategy in the west. Things like asset forfeiture, debanking in a myriad of forms, increased government intervention in financial systems, changing the rules suddenly every time a totally forseeable at some point financial crisis comes up (there is one every 10-15 years! they aren't surprises). It is completely reasonable to have some assets that the government cannot take away from you without actually going through the court process, putting the screws to someone and arguing to a judge that a crime took place. And that inflates in a predictable, controlled manner. The last 3 years has convinced me that I will own crypto by the time I die. Not bitcoin - indeed, I don't know what protocol it will be yet. But something.
- blep-arsh 5y ago
  Just for example, cryptocurrencies appear to be the best option if one wants to leave Russia with their savings at this point.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Also for entering it. We really need more neutral technologies.
mumblemumble 5y ago
> transact against the will of a powerful adversary such as governments. I would not personally be quite so confident that a state actor (or a well-capitalized non-state adversary such as a criminal organization) would not have the ability to severely curtail, if not outright eliminate, some other party's ability to execute cryptocurrency transactions. Most of us have no idea what unexploited vulnerabilities these sorts of organizations have found, and they didn't get to be as powerful as they are by habitually playing an ace up the sleeve when a three will do. Compare with the proverbial suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  > Compare with the proverbial suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete. Hence why governments around the world are pushing towards cash free societies. Physical cash is where most illegal (whether you think it's the good illegal or the bad illegal) transactions happen.
- Galanwe 5y ago
  > suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete. Indeed, but it also has drawbacks. You need to find someone with capability to use that much cash without suspicion. Also, I think most of the money laundering is made across borders, from people willing to enjoy their wealth in a country different than the one they earned it. Think money earned to US to be used in Mexico, or nationals of a heavy currency export regulated country (rmb, ruble). Customs are very efficient at looking for cash moving through these borders.
udfalkso 5y ago
You're forgetting a 2nd important use case. Protection against arbitrary, political, variable "money printing". This is important for a store of value.
- z3c0 5y ago
  That's the goal of Bitcoin and other deflationary cryptocurrencies, but not all cryotocurrencies adhere to that tenant.
zozbot234 5y ago
The government need not even be especially hostile per se, just unwilling or unable to adjudicate that particular transaction. With crypto, the basic operation of the transaction is enforced via a mechanism shared by all users of that cryptocurrency, and a mutually-trusted third-party arbitrator (or even a more complex decision mechanism, defined by a smart contract) can be chosen to address any potential concerns in advance. These are compelling properties even though they're rather costly to ensure when transactions are not centrally managed.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  except that in some case this private companies can change the rules of the game like happens whit etherium, who fork the blockhains after one of the biggest owner being theft for have an insecure smart contracts, and some Blockchain only allow certein type of transactions, o request specific fees for gambling for example.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I generally would not trust smart contracts to deal with those issues. They run afoul of the classic problem with ensuring that the blockchain and meatspace are in sync with each other. To wit: it may be very difficult for me to ensure that the smart contract does not contain a malicious payload. Even if we pinky swear to there being no malicious payloads. Perhaps even if I read the code in an effort to personally confirm that there's no funny business going on. This very problem is a big part of why smart contracts are becoming a popular tool for confidence artists. There seem to be a lot of people who are very (one might even say unreasonably) confident that the fact that smart contracts can't be altered after the fact makes them inherently trustworthy.
bestcoder69 5y ago
This is more commonly referred to as "crime".
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The definition of "crime" varies based on the whims of who's in power. People protesting against the Ukraine war... err, I mean "special military operation" (wouldn't want to be a criminal would I?) are currently also considered criminals by the Russian government, and so did people who resisted the Nazi invasion back in the day. I believe the possibility of breaking the law is a necessary escape hatch against authoritarianism. Back in the day this was achieved by physical limits (omnipresent surveillance & control just wasn't physically possible - the tech just wasn't there), nowadays this is becoming more and more difficult - which is great if your government is sane but recent events suggest that even relatively stable governments can quickly turn sour.
anonporridge 5y ago
Case in point, marijuana and sex work/pornography, even where legal, are very often not permitted in the financial system and often have to deal directly with physical cash, and of course were some of the early adopters of cryptocurrency. You don't have to find either of these use cases acceptable to understand the risk at play when the financial system can be used as a mechanism of control used to try to snuff out things the establishment upper class doesn't like without going through proper legal channels and kept in check by our elected representatives.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  In both of these equations you’re expecting a payment rails at the time of transaction to understand both the product and the regulatory environment for that product at a given location. This is unreasonably complex. What you’re asking for is a way to make these disproportionately illegal transactions on demand at scale. This isn’t a position on technology, it’s a position on government.
deet 5y ago
Seems like wishful thinking to me. Unless crypto becomes actually useful for real world transactions, it has to be converted to fiat currency for use, and all the exchanges or technologies that do that conversion are subject to the will of governments. There was literally a post on HN today in which a government proposed to curtail crypto transactions for entities it considers hostile: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/17/senator-elizabeth-warren-announces-sanctions-compliance-bill-for-crypto-companies/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/17/senator-elizabeth... Recently another government seized crypto assets from those it considered adversaries: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/16/canada-sanctions-34-crypto-wallets-tied-to-trucker-freedom-convoy/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/16/canada-sanctions-... And those are just actions taken by relatively benign governments that use regulation to accomplish their goals instead of force. It's tough to think that government-level actors couldn't just disrupt the crypto networks directly if they so desired, either through cyber attacks (ie denial of service or exploiting vulnerabilities that almost certainly exist in the crypto networks). Or in extreme cases even just taking control of network infrastructure directly. Or shutting off the internet. And no, Starlink will not save crypto users against adversaries who can jam EM communications. Governments are powerful and to think that crypto or anything in the internet space is resistant to that power in the most extreme situations is not wise.
- juanci_to 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said except a couple of things. >Unless crypto becomes actually useful for real world transactions, it has to be converted to fiat currency for use, and all the exchanges or technologies that do that conversion are subject to the will of governments. This is true, except that in some places governments are too inefficient to even control those things. The IT people works for them for pennies, and got there because they are the cousin of some politician. They are also not very capable, otherwise they would work for someone who paid them better and on time. I'm using my country as an example, where people trade them for money in fintech wallets and not banks, since they are more difficult to control despite also having a KYC process. >Governments are powerful and to think that crypto or anything in the internet space is resistant to that power in the most extreme situations is not wise. Other decentralized technologies simpler than cryptocurrencies prove this to be wrong. And I'm talking about torrents and some other kinds of P2P networks. Those things are used mostly for piratery, they make companies lose money, so there's an incentive for governments to take them down, yet they fail to do so. On the other hand, crypto is seen as an investment by people who actually own a lot of money. Investors from big banks sometimes have at least a very, very small portion of their portfolios on it because it would be dumb to not take that risk for just a small amount of money they can afford to lose. So a government might not be that much focused into taking it down since a lot of "important" folks of the business industry are on it too The only thing I think the US government might be truly worried about are the so-called stablecoins. Having an alternative to the USD is risky for their monetary control, since the supply can be artificially expanded with cryptos like UST which is a decentralized stablecoin, instead of centralized and backed by real dollars
ipaddr 5y ago
Government is not the only reason. The credit card cartel will deny certain types of businesses in areas they consider shady like sex toys or legal drugs or certain media. Cryto offers a payment method for these cases.
- hiyer 5y ago
  You don't need crypto for that. Cash will work. Or a system like India's UPI - direct, instantaneous inter-bank transfer, with no fees, via mobile apps.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. You'd be lucky to have working computers, power sources and internet connections in a hostile environment. Cash and physical assets are king in that domain. Governments can order exchanges to halt trading and liquidation, or demand haircuts, and 99% of people who hold cryptocurrency won't be able to do anything about it.
Animats 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. Yes. In the early days, people were thinking retail sales of illegal drugs. That turned out to be a petty cash application. What really powered Bitcoin usage was getting money out of China despite exchange controls. There have been disclosures in recent years which established that the money laundering sector was much larger than previously thought.[1][2][3] Just a fraction of that moving through the cryptocurrency system may account for most of the growth in Bitcoin. [1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ [2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/ [3] https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers
paulpauper 5y ago
All you are doing is transferring bits from a sender to recvier. to turn those bits into usable cash requires an offramp, and that is where regulation comes into play.
nrr 5y ago
The irony in this is that the Citizens United ruling, at least in the US, affirmed that spending money is speech. It's actually one of the reasons why I'm an ardent supporter of postal banking. Since the USPS is an arm of the federal government, it must work within the confines of the First Amendment[0]. As it stands, I remain pretty unconvinced that cryptocurrencies writ large solve this kind of (at least, what I call) "borderless" free speech problem today. They simply don't do enough to frustrate the state or the incumbent banking institutions, mostly because they aren't actually peer to peer enough where it counts. Notably, I can't transact with other people on the network with only my smartphone or a small computer communicating 1000's of kilometers over the radio using digital modes without also relying on, e.g., an exchange to act as an intermediary. How do these systems handle large-scale network partitions where an entire geographic region stops announcing its prefixes to the wider Internet but continues to process transactions and append to the blockchain within its borders? Does the blockchain fork? How is that fork resolved? (Is it ever resolved? The existence of Ethereum Classic implies to me that it isn't, or at least isn't required to be, and I find that prospect frankly frightening.) The tank analogy is quite apropos, I find. Without a convoy of trucks bringing in fuel, the tanks stop. An adversary powerful enough to sever your connection to the outside world (whether in terms of electricity to keep things going or network connectivity) for the purposes of transacting seems like quite the Achilles' heel. [0]: Modulo other rulings. Modulo the impartiality of SCOTUS.
- chasil 5y ago
  I want you to pay attention to this very carefully: https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html * ssh(1), sshd(8): add the sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com hybrid ECDH/x25519 + Streamlined NTRU Prime post-quantum KEX to the default KEXAlgorithms list (after the ECDH methods but before the prime-group DH ones). The next release of OpenSSH is likely to make this key exchange the default method. There is a non-zero probability that a quantum computer can break these key exchanges. This might not require a full application of Shor's algorithm, as studies continue with statistics from quantum annealers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurherman/2021/06/07/q-day-is-coming-sooner-than-we-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurherman/2021/06/07/q-day-i... If this happens, cryptocurrency as currently designed collapses.
tptacek 5y ago
It needs to be there and needs to be protected just like free speech needs to be protected. This doesn't mean anything. Lots of things "need to be there" and aren't. If it doesn't work, it won't work, even if you think it should work.
luckydata 5y ago
the amount of self delusion you need to write this down is frankly unbelievable
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

callamdelaney 5y ago

It’s 2022 - nobody cares about free speech or freedom.

OrlandoHakim 5y ago
In 2022 some may also care about a truly scarce digital store of value in a time of unprecedented inflation. Speaking about Bitcoin, not altcoins.
aeternum 5y ago
I care
tormock 5y ago
you forgot privacy... (i.e.: Monero, Zcash, etc)

roenxi 5y ago

Also, note that "take their stuff through extra-legal means" has become an uncomfortably common strategy in the west. Things like asset forfeiture, debanking in a myriad of forms, increased government intervention in financial systems, changing the rules suddenly every time a totally forseeable at some point financial crisis comes up (there is one every 10-15 years! they aren't surprises). It is completely reasonable to have some assets that the government cannot take away from you without actually going through the court process, putting the screws to someone and arguing to a judge that a crime took place. And that inflates in a predictable, controlled manner. The last 3 years has convinced me that I will own crypto by the time I die. Not bitcoin - indeed, I don't know what protocol it will be yet. But something.

blep-arsh 5y ago
Just for example, cryptocurrencies appear to be the best option if one wants to leave Russia with their savings at this point.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Also for entering it. We really need more neutral technologies.

mumblemumble 5y ago

> transact against the will of a powerful adversary such as governments. I would not personally be quite so confident that a state actor (or a well-capitalized non-state adversary such as a criminal organization) would not have the ability to severely curtail, if not outright eliminate, some other party's ability to execute cryptocurrency transactions. Most of us have no idea what unexploited vulnerabilities these sorts of organizations have found, and they didn't get to be as powerful as they are by habitually playing an ace up the sleeve when a three will do. Compare with the proverbial suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete.

anonporridge 5y ago
> Compare with the proverbial suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete. Hence why governments around the world are pushing towards cash free societies. Physical cash is where most illegal (whether you think it's the good illegal or the bad illegal) transactions happen.
Galanwe 5y ago
> suitcase full of cash. From a security perspective, it has the interesting property that transactions involving one don't have to be publicly recorded and processed on a public, global, openly accessible peer-to-peer network in order to complete. Indeed, but it also has drawbacks. You need to find someone with capability to use that much cash without suspicion. Also, I think most of the money laundering is made across borders, from people willing to enjoy their wealth in a country different than the one they earned it. Think money earned to US to be used in Mexico, or nationals of a heavy currency export regulated country (rmb, ruble). Customs are very efficient at looking for cash moving through these borders.

udfalkso 5y ago

You're forgetting a 2nd important use case. Protection against arbitrary, political, variable "money printing". This is important for a store of value.

z3c0 5y ago
That's the goal of Bitcoin and other deflationary cryptocurrencies, but not all cryotocurrencies adhere to that tenant.

zozbot234 5y ago

The government need not even be especially hostile per se, just unwilling or unable to adjudicate that particular transaction. With crypto, the basic operation of the transaction is enforced via a mechanism shared by all users of that cryptocurrency, and a mutually-trusted third-party arbitrator (or even a more complex decision mechanism, defined by a smart contract) can be chosen to address any potential concerns in advance. These are compelling properties even though they're rather costly to ensure when transactions are not centrally managed.

imachine1980_ 5y ago
except that in some case this private companies can change the rules of the game like happens whit etherium, who fork the blockhains after one of the biggest owner being theft for have an insecure smart contracts, and some Blockchain only allow certein type of transactions, o request specific fees for gambling for example.
mumblemumble 5y ago
I generally would not trust smart contracts to deal with those issues. They run afoul of the classic problem with ensuring that the blockchain and meatspace are in sync with each other. To wit: it may be very difficult for me to ensure that the smart contract does not contain a malicious payload. Even if we pinky swear to there being no malicious payloads. Perhaps even if I read the code in an effort to personally confirm that there's no funny business going on. This very problem is a big part of why smart contracts are becoming a popular tool for confidence artists. There seem to be a lot of people who are very (one might even say unreasonably) confident that the fact that smart contracts can't be altered after the fact makes them inherently trustworthy.

bestcoder69 5y ago

This is more commonly referred to as "crime".

Nextgrid 5y ago
The definition of "crime" varies based on the whims of who's in power. People protesting against the Ukraine war... err, I mean "special military operation" (wouldn't want to be a criminal would I?) are currently also considered criminals by the Russian government, and so did people who resisted the Nazi invasion back in the day. I believe the possibility of breaking the law is a necessary escape hatch against authoritarianism. Back in the day this was achieved by physical limits (omnipresent surveillance & control just wasn't physically possible - the tech just wasn't there), nowadays this is becoming more and more difficult - which is great if your government is sane but recent events suggest that even relatively stable governments can quickly turn sour.

anonporridge 5y ago

Case in point, marijuana and sex work/pornography, even where legal, are very often not permitted in the financial system and often have to deal directly with physical cash, and of course were some of the early adopters of cryptocurrency. You don't have to find either of these use cases acceptable to understand the risk at play when the financial system can be used as a mechanism of control used to try to snuff out things the establishment upper class doesn't like without going through proper legal channels and kept in check by our elected representatives.

nostrebored 5y ago
In both of these equations you’re expecting a payment rails at the time of transaction to understand both the product and the regulatory environment for that product at a given location. This is unreasonably complex. What you’re asking for is a way to make these disproportionately illegal transactions on demand at scale. This isn’t a position on technology, it’s a position on government.

deet 5y ago

Seems like wishful thinking to me. Unless crypto becomes actually useful for real world transactions, it has to be converted to fiat currency for use, and all the exchanges or technologies that do that conversion are subject to the will of governments. There was literally a post on HN today in which a government proposed to curtail crypto transactions for entities it considers hostile: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/17/senator-elizabeth-warren-announces-sanctions-compliance-bill-for-crypto-companies/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/17/senator-elizabeth... Recently another government seized crypto assets from those it considered adversaries: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/16/canada-sanctions-34-crypto-wallets-tied-to-trucker-freedom-convoy/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/16/canada-sanctions-... And those are just actions taken by relatively benign governments that use regulation to accomplish their goals instead of force. It's tough to think that government-level actors couldn't just disrupt the crypto networks directly if they so desired, either through cyber attacks (ie denial of service or exploiting vulnerabilities that almost certainly exist in the crypto networks). Or in extreme cases even just taking control of network infrastructure directly. Or shutting off the internet. And no, Starlink will not save crypto users against adversaries who can jam EM communications. Governments are powerful and to think that crypto or anything in the internet space is resistant to that power in the most extreme situations is not wise.

juanci_to 5y ago
I agree with everything you said except a couple of things. >Unless crypto becomes actually useful for real world transactions, it has to be converted to fiat currency for use, and all the exchanges or technologies that do that conversion are subject to the will of governments. This is true, except that in some places governments are too inefficient to even control those things. The IT people works for them for pennies, and got there because they are the cousin of some politician. They are also not very capable, otherwise they would work for someone who paid them better and on time. I'm using my country as an example, where people trade them for money in fintech wallets and not banks, since they are more difficult to control despite also having a KYC process. >Governments are powerful and to think that crypto or anything in the internet space is resistant to that power in the most extreme situations is not wise. Other decentralized technologies simpler than cryptocurrencies prove this to be wrong. And I'm talking about torrents and some other kinds of P2P networks. Those things are used mostly for piratery, they make companies lose money, so there's an incentive for governments to take them down, yet they fail to do so. On the other hand, crypto is seen as an investment by people who actually own a lot of money. Investors from big banks sometimes have at least a very, very small portion of their portfolios on it because it would be dumb to not take that risk for just a small amount of money they can afford to lose. So a government might not be that much focused into taking it down since a lot of "important" folks of the business industry are on it too The only thing I think the US government might be truly worried about are the so-called stablecoins. Having an alternative to the USD is risky for their monetary control, since the supply can be artificially expanded with cryptos like UST which is a decentralized stablecoin, instead of centralized and backed by real dollars

ipaddr 5y ago

Government is not the only reason. The credit card cartel will deny certain types of businesses in areas they consider shady like sex toys or legal drugs or certain media. Cryto offers a payment method for these cases.

hiyer 5y ago
You don't need crypto for that. Cash will work. Or a system like India's UPI - direct, instantaneous inter-bank transfer, with no fees, via mobile apps.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. You'd be lucky to have working computers, power sources and internet connections in a hostile environment. Cash and physical assets are king in that domain. Governments can order exchanges to halt trading and liquidation, or demand haircuts, and 99% of people who hold cryptocurrency won't be able to do anything about it.

Animats 5y ago

Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. Yes. In the early days, people were thinking retail sales of illegal drugs. That turned out to be a petty cash application. What really powered Bitcoin usage was getting money out of China despite exchange controls. There have been disclosures in recent years which established that the money laundering sector was much larger than previously thought.[1][2][3] Just a fraction of that moving through the cryptocurrency system may account for most of the growth in Bitcoin. [1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ [2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/ [3] https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers

paulpauper 5y ago

All you are doing is transferring bits from a sender to recvier. to turn those bits into usable cash requires an offramp, and that is where regulation comes into play.

nrr 5y ago

The irony in this is that the Citizens United ruling, at least in the US, affirmed that spending money is speech. It's actually one of the reasons why I'm an ardent supporter of postal banking. Since the USPS is an arm of the federal government, it must work within the confines of the First Amendment[0]. As it stands, I remain pretty unconvinced that cryptocurrencies writ large solve this kind of (at least, what I call) "borderless" free speech problem today. They simply don't do enough to frustrate the state or the incumbent banking institutions, mostly because they aren't actually peer to peer enough where it counts. Notably, I can't transact with other people on the network with only my smartphone or a small computer communicating 1000's of kilometers over the radio using digital modes without also relying on, e.g., an exchange to act as an intermediary. How do these systems handle large-scale network partitions where an entire geographic region stops announcing its prefixes to the wider Internet but continues to process transactions and append to the blockchain within its borders? Does the blockchain fork? How is that fork resolved? (Is it ever resolved? The existence of Ethereum Classic implies to me that it isn't, or at least isn't required to be, and I find that prospect frankly frightening.) The tank analogy is quite apropos, I find. Without a convoy of trucks bringing in fuel, the tanks stop. An adversary powerful enough to sever your connection to the outside world (whether in terms of electricity to keep things going or network connectivity) for the purposes of transacting seems like quite the Achilles' heel. [0]: Modulo other rulings. Modulo the impartiality of SCOTUS.

chasil 5y ago
I want you to pay attention to this very carefully: https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html * ssh(1), sshd(8): add the sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com hybrid ECDH/x25519 + Streamlined NTRU Prime post-quantum KEX to the default KEXAlgorithms list (after the ECDH methods but before the prime-group DH ones). The next release of OpenSSH is likely to make this key exchange the default method. There is a non-zero probability that a quantum computer can break these key exchanges. This might not require a full application of Shor's algorithm, as studies continue with statistics from quantum annealers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurherman/2021/06/07/q-day-is-coming-sooner-than-we-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurherman/2021/06/07/q-day-i... If this happens, cryptocurrency as currently designed collapses.

tptacek 5y ago

It needs to be there and needs to be protected just like free speech needs to be protected. This doesn't mean anything. Lots of things "need to be there" and aren't. If it doesn't work, it won't work, even if you think it should work.

luckydata 5y ago

the amount of self delusion you need to write this down is frankly unbelievable

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]