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Is this the most value-dense information on Earth?
- whatshisface 13y agoConsidering that anyone trying to sell that much bitcoin at once would pretty much crash the currency, how much is it really worth? Perhaps some kind of revolutionary mathematical fact could be worth even more? This is a very interesting question. EDIT: A lot of people responding to me seem to be trying to contradict my argument by pointing out that if it was true, it would be true for almost everything. I don't get how that works, because it is true of everything! Flooding the market will always reduce the value of what you are selling.
- yelnatz 13y agoConsidering when you sell all the gold in Fort Knox all at once would pretty much crash gold's value. How much is the gold in Fort Knox really worth?
- toomuchtodo 13y agohttp://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/?action=fun_facts13 http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/?action=fun_f... Amount of present gold holdings: 147.3 million ounces. The gold is held as an asset of the United States at book value of $42.22 per ounce. http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/futures/metals/ http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/futures/metals/ COMEX Gold Value: 1,250.40/per troy ounce 1 ounce = 0.911458333 troy ounces $167,875,968,689 USD You are correct. Selling that much gold at once would decimate the gold market.
- rtkwe 13y agoI'd find it really odd if the ounces they reference aren't troy ounces, which is the true de facto for precious metal weight quotes. To the true matter though is that valuing things by their liquid value is problematic especially when their liquidity isn't ever really going to be utilized.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI sent a tweet to @usmint to find out. I'll update my post accordingly.
- clarkm 13y agoThat argument proves too much [1]. The same can be said for almost all stock, e.g. Bill Gates could sell of his shares of Microsoft and crash the stock price. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proving_too_much http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
- Eliezer 13y agoNo he couldn't. Microsoft shares have intrinsic earnings, and while the stock price might go down, I wouldn't expect them to go down far enough to generate predictable excess returns. Lots of people want predictable excess returns and they have enough money to buy all of Gates's shares and then some.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adventured 13y agoUnless you think bitcoin is going to disappear in the next 6-12 months, it's worth a lot. You could easily liquidate out of that entire position over the next six months without crashing the bitcoin market. In fact, the added liquidity might help lessen the volatility.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cheesylard 13y agohttps://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.890736,+-85.963174&hl=en&ll=37.890756,-85.96422&spn=0.010668,0.017552&sll=39.557931,-119.850842&sspn=0.66703,1.123352&t=h&z=16 https://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.890736,+-85.963174&hl=en&l...
- perfmode 13y agoLet's suppose you represent the coordinates as four 8-bit values: 37deg 54', -85deg 57'. Then these 32-bits provide the whereabouts of about $238 Billion dollars[1]. For this information to have a higher value-density, it must grant you a 0.01% chance of controlling all of the gold in Fort Knox. Good luck getting in, getting out, and surviving the manhunt. [1] Wikipedia
- baddox 13y agoKnowledge of that location has very little value.
- downer94 13y agoBruce Schneier once equated the security of a 256 bit private key by comparing the energy needed to brute force all possible combinations of 256 bits to the amount of energy harnessed for one year by a Dyson Sphere built around the sun. So maybe there's a correlation, in the sense of knowing the GPS coordinates of Fort Knox, and targeting it with an ICBM?
- perfmode 13y agolink: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_...
- downer94 13y agoThat's the one!
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoIsn't the gold at Fort Knox already off the market? Would destroying it really alter the value of existent non-Knox gold that much? How much?
- downer94 13y agoWell, what if you just ransom it? Targeting it is hardly destructive.
- losethos 13y agoBible C:\TAD\Text\QUIX.TXT earth, brother squire, and if that's not enough for you, take as many more, for you may have it all your own way and stretch yourself to your heart's content. Oh that I could see burnt and turned to ashes the first man that meddled with knight-errantry or at any rate the first who chose to be squire to such fools as all the knights-errant of past times must have been! Of those of the present day I say nothing, because, as your worship is one of them, I respect them, and because I know your worship k
- sfrechtling 13y agoAs an alternative to this, what about ICBM/Nuclear Launch codes - they have the potential to destroy a lot of value (both natural, material and psychological)? Or even a terrorist's planning information prior to an event? Or even genetic code?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zacharycohn 13y agoAccording to an article from a few days ago, for about twenty years the nuclear launch codes were "00000000."
- georgecmu 13y agoWell, incidentally Minuteman launch codes were set to 00000000 for about 20 years [1]. Can you argue that zero entropy effectively reduces the number of information bits to 0 and thus drives up the value per bit to infinity? [1] http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-combination-on-my-luggage/ http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-combination-...
- perfmode 13y agoPossessing the launch codes is one thing. Positioning oneself such that it is possible to extract value is something else entirely. The difference is the private key gives the beholder power over the wallet at any time from anywhere in the world. No additional information is required.
- jerf 13y agoI'm sure a root private key from Verisign or something could give that a good run for its money on a byte-for-byte basis, though it's harder to directly valuate.
- chiph 13y agoAt some point, someone's going to decide it'll be easier to try and crack that key than mine.
- hrjet 13y agoIs that true? Can the "difficulty" level in hashing ever reach the bit-length of the key?
- chiph 13y agoTechnically, I don't know, as I don't personally understand the code behind the mining and what the difficulty would be like to mine the very last bitcoin. But from a social aspect, cracking that key would be like hitting one of the multi-state lotteries. And people continue to play them all the time, despite the astronomical odds against their winning.
- hrjet 13y agoThinking about this a bit more, if it ever becomes reasonable to co-operatively crack a key, it could only be a good thing for bitcoin economy. 1. If the owner of the wallet still has access to it, they can easily transfer the amount to smaller wallets, and reduce their risk. 2. If the owner has lost access, it is good for the community to recover the lost coins.
- Tzunamitom 13y agoDepends how you define value... Arguably the knowledge that e=mc^2 is far more valuable, and contained within much less data.
- perfmode 13y agoDoes secrecy matter? There was a period in history where this claim was certainly true. Now, not so much. Information of this nature loses value when revealed. That private key holds value until it becomes public. Then, the wallet is plundered and its value falls to nought.
- jere 13y ago>Thus, each individual bit protects USD $631,212... USD $631,212 per bit That seems a rather flawed way of viewing the density, since that key represents 2^256 possible combinations. So if you take a way a bit, the density by that measure goes up 0.3%. Practically speaking, it should double. Why don't we instead calculate the density as the expected value of guessing one combination. In other words, let's say I have stolen an ATM card and can wipe a bank account containing $100,000 by guessing the 4 digit pin: $100,000/(10^4) = $10/guess Or in our case: $161,590,330/(2^256) = $1.39e-69/guess Not so impressive now.
- jsharpe 13y agoI agree that that makes a lot more sense in a way, but there is another interpretation. Suppose you are omniscient but that you have a terminal illness, and have 256 time units left in your life to give value to your heirs. Due to your illness, you can only communicate by blinking. If you can give one bit of information per time unit by blinking, what is the information you can give your heirs that will maximize their inheritance?
- perfmode 13y agoThis is very clever. I love it.
- thrill 13y ago--. . - .- .--- --- -...
- jere 13y agoBrevity is the soul of wit. Omniscient? Well, I'm not very creative, but you should be able to get off at least half a dozen lottery picks in that.
- jsharpe 13y agoThat's a good point. You'd have to restrict to information available to someone at the current time, and not based on future randomness (like winning lottery numbers). Otherwise, you could make (effectively) unbounded money by just specifying the stock symbol of a company that gains the most in value in the next year.
- rch 13y agoHow about peptides? The targeting end of the anti-obesity drug described in [1] can be expressed as 7 characters (KGGRAKD) in a 20 character alphabet. Another agreement [2] values candidate peptides at $32.8M each, even without a specific therapeutic application. The same value could be applied to certain short linear motifs, which could be composed of as few as 3 amino acids. These strings don't suffer from the same liquidity problems that limit the real value of bitcoin addresses either (i.e. the value is really in the data). [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3666164/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3666164/ [2] http://www.arrowheadresearch.com/press-releases/arrowhead-and-shire-enter-collaboration-and-license-agreement-develop-peptide http://www.arrowheadresearch.com/press-releases/arrowhead-an...
- robseed 13y agoChaitin's constant gets my vote for most valuable number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant
- adventured 13y agoThere are financial holdings worth 100+ times that bitcoin wallet. Likely protected by a lot less than 100 times the security of a 256 bit key. Apple's hedge fund, Braeburn Capital, likely qualifies. It's arguably the largest hedge fund in the world. Gain access to their network and you could wreak serious financial havoc.
- perfmode 13y agoIt is probably the case that there are multiple cryptographically-secured security layers standing between an anonymous internet user and the innermost layer of such a system.
- adventured 13y agoI'm assuming you wouldn't try to go after their network from an anonymous Internet user. Rather, stuxnet comes to mind. We're talking about $150 billion after all. Of course the other issue is, I'm betting they're holding a lot of short term government securities. It simply isn't plausible to steal $70 billion worth of short term US paper and do anything with it.
- pyalot2 13y agoI'd argue no. It's definitely some kind of valuable and/or dense, but it's not that simple. The value is purely held up by what value people ascribe to this information. This can change rapidly (and it does), so the precise measure of value isn't really known until you actually convert it. If you actually try to convert in a short amount of time, it'll rapidly destroy its own value, because the market doesn't have the kind of depth to absorb a hundreds of millions of USD conversion, so the only way to satisfy that bitcoin volume would be a rapid drop in price, which would lower the amount of USD in order to satisfy it, or conversely, increase the purchase power of everybody on the market. The true value of this stash is thus, in fact, some fraction of the current valuation of bitcoin. The larger the stash, the smaller the fraction becomes, because the larger the stash, the less able will you be to realize the value. This is the reason the winkelvii are creating an ETF. They're sitting on 1% of the coins in existence. An attempt to realize profits would take an extremely long time without moving the market quite adversely. So they need to create a vehicle that allows them to massively increase the market depth.
- hamburglar 13y agoThe value is not wholly contained in the bits of the private key, it's also dependent on other state (namely, the state of the wallet). Consider the value of those bits once the money has moved.