"He worships at the temple of his own narcissism."
If you have a moment do check out a few of the Crypto-comments to get a feel for....I'm not sure what exactly:
sdgI can't swear to the provenance of the piece below but it came to us via a gentleman with a bunch of letters from Harvard following his name who refers to MIT as "The trade school down the river".
Funny enough, Jemima is basically proving CZ’s point with this terribly misinformed article.
“HODLing means you are not actually using crypto for payments, its original intended purpose. ”
Thinking crypto is just for payments displays a huge amount of ignorance. Has the author of this piece heard of smart contracts? Does she even know what they are? This piece indicates probably not.
This article is written by someone who knows little about crypto, for readers who know little about crypto but want to feel good about their decision to stay out of it....
...sdg
Perhaps, but that is the original intended purpose for bitcoin. The idea that the original intended purpose for crypto in general is payments and only payments, is completely wrong.
If it had been ciphered onto an immutable blockchain the provenance question would be moot but it wasn't, that's life.
I was too chicken to post it until last December:
One of the commenters in the post immediately below, "The FT's Izabella Kaminska Explores the Numéraire and Why It Matters" mentions the fairly widely known fact that the NSA is the home of the SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) and includes the link.
There is another link that I think is even more interesting, this one hosted at:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htmThe link goes to:
Anonymous: Fried, Frank got NSA's permission to make this report available. They have offered to make copies available by contacting them at <21stcen ffhsj.com=""> or (202) 639-7200. See: http://www.ffhsj.com/bancmail/21starch/961017.htm
Received October 31, 1996
With the Compliments of Thomas P. Vartanian
Fried, Frank, Harris, Schriver & Jacobson
1001 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004-2505
Telephone: (202) 639-7200
HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH
Laurie Law, Susan Sabett, Jerry SolinasNational Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology
Cryptology Division
18 June 1996
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. WHAT IS ELECTRONIC CASH?
1.1 Electronic Payment
1.2 Security of Electronic Payments
1.3 Electronic Cash
1.4 Multiple Spending
2. A CRYPTOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION
2.1 Public-Key Cryptographic Tools
2.2 A Simplified Electronic Cash Protocol
2.3 Untraceable Electronic Payments
2.4 A Basic Electronic Cash Protocol
3. PROPOSED OFF-LINE IMPLEMENTATIONS
3.1 Including Identifying Information
3.2 Authentication and Signature Techniques
3.3 Summary of Proposed Implementations
4. OPTIONAL FEATURES OF OFF-LINE CASH
4. 1 Transferability
4.2 Divisibility
5. SECURITY ISSUES
5.1 Multiple Spending Prevention
5.2 Wallet Observers
5.3 Security Failures
5.4 Restoring Traceability
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
With the onset of the Information Age, our nation is becoming increasingly dependent upon network communications. Computer-based technology is significantly impacting our ability to access, store, and distribute information. Among the most important uses of this technology is electronic commerce: performing financial transactions via electronic information exchanged over telecommunications lines. A key requirement for electronic commerce is the development of secure and efficient electronic payment systems. The need for security is highlighted by the rise of the Internet, which promises to be a leading medium for future electronic commerce.Electronic payment systems come in many forms including digital checks, debit cards, credit cards, and stored value cards. The usual security features for such systems are privacy (protection from eavesdropping), authenticity (provides user identification and message integrity), and nonrepudiation (prevention of later denying having performed a transaction) .
The type of electronic payment system focused on in this paper is electronic cash. As the name implies, electronic cash is an attempt to construct an electronic payment system modelled after our paper cash system. Paper cash has such features as being: portable (easily carried), recognizable (as legal tender) hence readily acceptable, transferable (without involvement of the financial network), untraceable (no record of where money is spent), anonymous (no record of who spent the money) and has the ability to make "change." The designers of electronic cash focused on preserving the features of untraceability and anonymity. Thus, electronic cash is defined to be an electronic payment system that provides, in addition to the above security features, the properties of user anonymity and payment untraceability..
In general, electronic cash schemes achieve these security goals via digital signatures. They can be considered the digital analog to a handwritten signature. Digital signatures are based on public key cryptography. In such a cryptosystem, each user has a secret key and a public key. The secret key is used to create a digital signature and the public key is needed to verify the digital signature. To tell who has signed the information (also called the message), one must be certain one knows who owns a given public key. This is the problem of key management, and its solution requires some kind of authentication infrastructure. In addition, the system must have adequate network and physical security to safeguard the secrecy of the secret keys.
This report has surveyed the academic literature for cryptographic techniques for implementing secure electronic cash systems. Several innovative payment schemes providing user anonymity and payment untraceability have been found. Although no particular payment system has been thoroughly analyzed, the cryptography itself appears to be sound and to deliver the promised anonymity.
These schemes are far less satisfactory, however, from a law enforcement point of view. In particular, the dangers of money laundering and counterfeiting are potentially far more serious than with paper cash. These problems exist in any electronic payment system, but they are made much worse by the presence of anonymity. Indeed, the widespread use of electronic cash would increase the vulnerability of the national financial system to Information Warfare attacks. We discuss measures to manage these risks; these steps, however, would have the effect of limiting the users' anonymity.
This report is organized in the following manner. Chapter 1 defines the basic concepts surrounding electronic payment systems and electronic cash. Chapter 2 provides the reader with a high level cryptographic description of electronic cash protocols in terms of basic authentication mechanisms. Chapter 3 technically describes specific implementations that have been proposed in the academic literature. In Chapter 4, the optional features of transferability and divisibility for off-line electronic cash are presented. Finally, in Chapter 5 the security issues associated with electronic cash are discussed.
The authors of this paper wish to acknowledge the following people for their contribution to this research effort through numerous discussions and review of this paper: Kevin Igoe, John Petro, Steve Neal, and Mel Currie.
1. WHAT IS ELECTRONIC CASH?
We begin by carefully defining "electronic cash." This term is often applied to any electronic payment scheme that superficially resembles cash to the user. In fact, however, electronic cash is a specific kind of electronic payment scheme, defined by certain cryptographic properties. We now focus on these properties.......MUCH, MUCH MORE
A couple other posts that turned up while I was looking for the above:
"Is an Editable Blockchain the Future of Finance?"
So the lady asked, "Inquiring minds want to know: can blockchain reconcile 200% institutional ETF ownership?".And for total indecipherable inscrutability:
Sure, why not.
Of course this is no longer blockchain, it's some sort of database combined with an eraser head. We'll call it 'blockhead'.
CIA Admits to Snooping On Noam Chomsky (and Richard Dawkins swings by)
The CIA couldn't make heads or tails of what Chomsky was talking about....
From Foreign Policy:
For years, the Central Intelligence Agency denied it had a secret file on MIT professor and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. But a new government disclosure obtained by The Cable reveals for the first time that the agency did in fact gather records on the anti-war iconoclast during his heyday in the 1970s.When consulted the Chomskybot replied:
The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky's entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley's archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority.
The breakthrough in the search for Chomsky's CIA file comes in the form of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: "We did not locate any records responsive to your request." The denials were never entirely credible, given Chomsky's brazen anti-war activism in the 60s and 70s -- and the CIA's well-documented track record of domestic espionage in the Vietnam era. But the CIA kept denying, and many took the agency at its word .... MORE
"It may be, then, that the descriptive power of the base component is not quite equivalent to the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). A consequence of the approach just outlined is that a descriptively adequate grammar is unspecified with respect to a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. Nevertheless, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is rather different from a descriptive fact. In the discussion of resumptive pronouns following (81), the systematic use of complex symbols is, apparently, determined by the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. So far, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is to be regarded as the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar...."For students, the Chomskybot can give you the same leg up in linguistics that postmodern literature aficionados (and Richard Dawkins!*) have enjoyed via the Postmodernism Generator:
Derridaist reading and Lyotardist narrative
Stefan N. H. Geoffrey
Department of Politics, Oxford University
1. Textual appropriation and subcultural desublimation
If one examines Derridaist reading, one is faced with a choice: either accept Lyotardist narrative or conclude that sexual identity, ironically, has objective value. If Derridaist reading holds, we have to choose between subcultural desublimation and the textual paradigm of context.
It could be said that the main theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the reader as participant. Lacan uses the term ‘Lyotardist narrative’ to denote the difference between society and narrativity.
However, in Dubliners, Joyce deconstructs subcultural desublimation; in Ulysses, however, he denies Derridaist reading. Several theories concerning the role of the writer as reader may be discovered....MUCH MORE
