A whole lot of shills have been posting a whole lot of mostly valid criticisms of Bitcoin, and I have been silently suppressing them, because I doubt their capability and willingness to have a genuinely informative discussion of Bitcoin, rather than randomly and unresponsively spewing fear, uncertainty, and doubt from scripts compiled by morons who did not understand these problems in the first place. But the issues need discussion anyway. …
Category: crypto
Microsoft turns off the past
For a very long time I have been using a very old windows tool, abandonware, but there is no replacement for it. I use it to keep a very large pile of structured data and metadata about sensitive information. And this tool suddenly stopped working. After playing around a bit, I came to suspect that the latest windows update had turned it off, probably with a very large amount of …
How to apply recursive snarks for a fully scalable, fully private, currency
From the very beginning of bitcoin, people worried that it could not scale to the required size. It does not scale because it is a massively replicated public ledger. Thus any real solution means making the ledger not public. Which means either centralization, a central bank digital currency, which is the path Ethereum is walking, or privacy. You cure both blockchain bloat and blockchain analysis by not putting the data …
Enormous move in bitcoin coming up
The good news is that in the not very distant future, everyone who matters is going to be using Bitcoin. The bad news is that if they will be using something resembling currently available software, they will still be net peons, not netizens. Probably no dramatic price changes next week. Or next month. Maybe not next year. But we are on a big move up that will likely continue going …
zeek rollups can enable full blockchain scalability and full blockchain privacy
The fundamental strength of the blockchain architecture is that it is a immutable public ledger. The fundamental flaw of the blockchain architecture is that it is an immutable public ledger. This is a problem for privacy and fungibility, but what is really biting is scalability, the sheer size of the thing. Every full peer has to download every transaction that anyone ever did, evaluate that transaction for validity, and store …
Current events
This blog does not normally report, nor pay much attention to, current events, except as they illustrate the long sweep of history. But, there is a bunch of stuff happening now. Four demons doing a weak-ass imitation of the the four horsemen of the apocalypse are on their way. First and foremost for me is that the heat on crypto currency is going up, and it looks like the blood …
All FIPS compliant cryptographic libraries are backdoored and in the pocket of our enemies
As are many non FIPS compliant cryptographic libraries. We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make sure that cryptographic implementations have backdoors supplied for the NSA. A good way to make money is to construct a cryptographic library, and, if it gets to be widely used, a mysterious and secretive generous benefactor will show up. To resolve the dragnet …
Bitcoin time
I have been diversifying from Bitcoin to ADA, because I was profoundly unhappy with Bitcoins scalability, and with its implementation of the lightning network, and I recommended that other people do so. This turned out to be a bad idea. The bitcoin lightning network substantially eases the scaling problem for an order of magnitude or two growth, after which scalability is likely to start biting again. The bitcoin lightning network’s …
Where we go from here
Electoral politics is dead, though its corpse will continue to be paraded about for a considerable time. It will not be revived for a very long time, for a live Republic requires a virtuous elite, and creating a virtuous elite is a project that requires a virtuous King, and a few generations. I hoped and prayed that Trump would retain power – either as president, or as leader of the …
Stormfront is a honeypot
Stormfront uses Google Analytics. Google Analytics runs an alarmingly large pile of obfuscated javascript code on your browser that if you visit Stormfront, can very likely uniquely identify your browser, even if you are accessing Stromfront through Tor to anonymize your IP. Thus, you visit Stormfront, carefully using a fake name and an anonymized IP. And then you visit Youtube with the same browser, and Youtube says that you cannot …