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Guns. Guns are how. Guns are how governments achieve their objectives. There is no crypto scheme, no algorithm, no possible arrangement of private keys and Mer
by throwaway9980 4y ago
Guns. Guns are how. Guns are how governments achieve their objectives.
There is no crypto scheme, no algorithm, no possible arrangement of private keys and Merkle trees that can escape the reality of men with guns.
- 3a2d29 4y agoRelevant comic: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- Petersipoi 4y agoAre you suggesting that the Bahamas infiltrated FTX with guns and took their keys?
- scq 4y agoNo. They just told FTX to transfer the money, and FTX complied.
- ceejayoz 4y agoNo, they're suggesting that SBF is in their jurisdiction, which gives them substantial "do what we say, or else" power.
- thrown_22 4y agoWe could call that problem something fancy like the Byzantine General Problem and try and figure out ways to solve it mathematically.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 4y agoIt's the $5 wrench problem and unless you find a way to land adamantium bones, I suspect math won't help.
- thrown_22 4y ago>Hur hur, street smarts better than smart smarts. It's a solved problem, and has been since the first bitcoin paper. That no one read that and just heard "magic internet gold I can get rich from" is their problem and not mine. You don't get rich quick off the bitcoin protocol however so we have people run places like FTX: centralize and get the big bucks because they provide convenience. Then act surprised when it goes tits up like every other centralized system. Same thing with people not encrypting their emails or not using tor as a bridge to the internet. In short: if you're the type of person who doesn't have their own key, yeah, prepare to get wrenched. The rest of us can manage our exposure quite easily.
- arcticbull 4y ago> > Hur hur, street smarts better than smart smarts. I never said that, all I said was that this is not the BGP problem, it's the $5 wrench problem. And it's not a solved problem, governments seize crypto all the time and people get tortured for their keys regularly. Just a few days ago the US picked up 50,000BTC. All of crypto is a get rich quick scheme, but people want their winnings denominated in fiat which is why exchanges exist. It's hard to reconcile "best performing asset in history!!" with "you can't get rich off bitcoin." > In short: if you're the type of person who doesn't have their own key, yeah, prepare to get wrenched. The rest of us can manage our exposure quite easily. You have this completely reversed. If you're the type of person who does have their own keys prepare to get wrenched.
- thrown_22 4y ago>Every criminal we have caught was stupid, ergo all criminals are stupid. Sure thing bud.
- dendriti 4y agoOK so not actually guns but "government" then. Not as dramatic though. OP is likely the same kind of person who calls taxes "theft" for rhetorical purposes.
- nostromo 4y agoHow do you think governments force people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do?
- theossuary 4y agoUsing people. Governments have been powerful far longer than guns have existed.
- bigyikes 4y agoWhat are the people holding if you resist with enough strength?
- devmunchies 4y ago> using people You mean violence. Physical force. In that context, the means is irrelevant and pedantic.
- Dylan16807 4y agoSo why specify guns? Especially when they're so rarely used in situations like this.
- smegger001 4y agobecause most governments quit using swords long enough ago that guns are now the symbol representing violent force.
- lazide 4y agoUsed? Sure. You don’t need to use it when everyone knows what will happen. The presence is enough 99% of the time. Or are you saying cops don’t have real pistols in their holsters, and agents just pretend to be armed on those raids?
- roywiggins 4y agoIt probably looks like someone showing up with a court order, but government agents with the right to use violence to enforce court orders is a large portion of what gives such orders teeth. Of course, violence isn't the only sort of coercion... but it's part of it.
- cercatrova 4y agoXKCD 538 remains ever relevant.
- DavidPeiffer 4y agoWow, that's from February 2nd, 2009. October 31, 2008 was when the bitcoin white paper was published. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- cercatrova 4y agoWell, it was back when crypto still colloquially meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Of course, in this case it's the same thing because cryptocurrency uses cryptography underneath.
- antod 4y agoAnd on the current topic, crytocurrency really does mean hidden currency.
- School-Cotton 4y agoI’m pretty sure by “crypto” they meant “cryptography” (its original meaning), not “cryptocurrency” here.
- TacticalCoder 4y agoNot really. That one has been solved seen Bitcoin BIP 39 with plausible deniability. I mean: unless the attacker knows exactly how much coins you have, he has zero way to way if you're unlocking a decoy wallet or the real one.
- nroets 4y agoSo the number of coins I have is not revealed by the Blockchain ? That sounds so complicated, that even someone with a physics degree from MIT will not be able to make it work.
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- TacticalCoder 4y ago> There is no crypto scheme, no algorithm, no possible arrangement of private keys and Merkle trees that can escape the reality of men with guns. On the contrary. It's the only case where maths can defend vs men with guns. Multi sig schemes spread over different people over several continents make the "men with guns" thing very difficult. Or multisig but m-out-of-n, with a dead beat: if after x weeks you don't hear of person A, person B and C move the coins to a new sig where person A isn't involved anymore. There are also a shitloads of things you can do with smart contracts. For example you can have a smart contract where if person A's private key doesn't sign anything for more than x weeks ("blocks"), the funds are destroyed. There also the whole plausible deniability thing: where it's impossible to know where a hardware unlocked with a hardware wallet is the real thing or not. $5 wrench attack, here's my real password: take the 50 millions. Oops. Decoy. On the other password there's $2bn.
- justinator 4y ago>On the contrary. It's the only case where maths can defend vs men with guns. Didn't work in this case.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoThey didn't have a system set up to protect against that. Their private keys were on a shared email account
- sillysaurusx 4y ago(Lol. Sorry for the empty comment, but this FTX situation is just a comedy gift that keeps on giving. I imagine in 5 years we’ll still be discovering new things to find funny about it.)
- throweroni 4y agoHoly wow. That's wild. Ten years ago when my crypto was worth barely anything I had an airgapped, full disk encrypted, RasPi which required a Shamir's Secret Sharing key arrangement to unlock as my cold storage... just because it was something fun to setup. Here a multi-billion dollar enterprise has less sophisticated OpSec. Just... wow.
- nathanvanfleet 4y agoThat's a little dramatic
- hestefisk 4y agoPeople with guns. Pls respect gender equality.
- concordDance 4y agoIt's pretty much just men enforcing court orders, particularly in the Bahamas. Side note: its interesting how "men" has gone from sometimes being gender neutral to being almost exclusively male and how "man" has gone most of the way down the same path.