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The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been b

by bob1029 7mo ago

The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken. Not on a website like this. I can verify its integrity by opening robinhood on my phone.

logicallee 7mo ago
>The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken. We actually see the incentive in the other direction, if we were able to reduce the search space for bitcoin proof-of-work (by applying thousands of higher-order algabraic theorems end-to-end to reduce the search space somewhat[1]), we would be financially incentivized not to tell anyone and mine at a discount. The financial incentive is against open research and disclosure. We don't get anything out of disclosing this except a neat publication. [1] interestingly, ASICs (which are usually used to mine bitcoin) basically encode every operation verbatim, they don't use higher order mathematics at all. However, reducing mining complexity is not really on the horizon, even with our latest approaches, since it would require end-to-end complete control over the double-SHA-256 pipeline. That's considerably harder than just finding a collision when you're allowed to search just the tail part (the final rounds).
ahofmann 7mo ago
Well does it? If I would be able to break SHA2 and make myself rich with it, I would need to be sure that nobody would find out, that Bitcoin can be manipulated. The second anyone is aware, I wouldn't be rich anymore.
- TomatoCo 7mo ago
  Wouldn't that be the play, though? Get a buttload of bitcoin, turn it into real money, then destroy bitcoin. If you found a break in bitcoin you wouldn't rely on keeping your wealth in bitcoin and then hoping nobody else discovers it.
  - Retr0id 7mo ago
    The trick would be to find some financial instrument that lets you short BTC, or make prediction-market bets on a falling price.

by bob1029 7mo ago

logicallee 7mo ago

>The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken. We actually see the incentive in the other direction, if we were able to reduce the search space for bitcoin proof-of-work (by applying thousands of higher-order algabraic theorems end-to-end to reduce the search space somewhat[1]), we would be financially incentivized not to tell anyone and mine at a discount. The financial incentive is against open research and disclosure. We don't get anything out of disclosing this except a neat publication. [1] interestingly, ASICs (which are usually used to mine bitcoin) basically encode every operation verbatim, they don't use higher order mathematics at all. However, reducing mining complexity is not really on the horizon, even with our latest approaches, since it would require end-to-end complete control over the double-SHA-256 pipeline. That's considerably harder than just finding a collision when you're allowed to search just the tail part (the final rounds).

ahofmann 7mo ago

Well does it? If I would be able to break SHA2 and make myself rich with it, I would need to be sure that nobody would find out, that Bitcoin can be manipulated. The second anyone is aware, I wouldn't be rich anymore.

TomatoCo 7mo ago
Wouldn't that be the play, though? Get a buttload of bitcoin, turn it into real money, then destroy bitcoin. If you found a break in bitcoin you wouldn't rely on keeping your wealth in bitcoin and then hoping nobody else discovers it.
- Retr0id 7mo ago
  The trick would be to find some financial instrument that lets you short BTC, or make prediction-market bets on a falling price.