“Among policy makers alert for signs of the next financial disaster, Italy’s mountain of uncollectable bank debt is a subject discussed in tones ordinarily reserved for piles of plutonium.”
Category: economics – Page 186
Progress in real science is steady, follows proper methodology and respects engineering safety. We live in an amazing world where medical progress is advancing rapidly, sadly we also have those willing to jump the gun hawking unproven experimental therapies without sufficient data.
Unproven therapies and people jumping the gun to make a quick buck are a plague in the aging research field. Real science is slow and methodical but ultimately gets results that ensure safe therapies can be deployed in the healthcare arena. At Lifespan.io we are passionate about supporting the progress of science that is conducted properly.
“The life science community should embrace the discrediting of unproven therapies promoted without data for economic gain, and instead focus on the promise of research held to the highest standards.”
#aging #crowdfundthecure
Worried about security for your bitcoin in the face of quantum computing? According to computer researchers, there’s no reason to be.
Source: https://hacked.com/breathe-easy-bitcoiners-quantum-computing…encryption
Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future.
Matthew Amy from Canada’s University of Waterloo proposes just this in a paper by the International Association of Cryptologic Research.
Amy, and researchers from Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, examined attacks against SHA-2 and SHA-3 with Grover’s algorithm.
Grover’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm that finds with high probability the input to black box functions that produce particular, and predictable, output values.
Grover’s algorithm could brute-force a 128-bit symmetric cryptographic key in roughly 264iterations,” Wikipedia states, “or a 256-bit key in roughly 2128 iterations. As a result, it is sometimes suggested that symmetric key lengths be doubled to protect against future quantum attacks.”
Researchers surmise SHA-256 and SHA3-256 need 2166 “logical qubit cycles” to break, and the paper suggests quantum papers pose little threat, though classical processors will need to manage them.
The paper notes: “The main difficulty is that the coherence time of physical qubits is finite. Noise in the physical system will eventually corrupt the state of any long computation,” the paper states. “Preserving the state of a logical qubit is an active process that requires periodic evaluation of an error detection and correction routine.”
With ASICs running at a few million hashes per second, it would take Grover’s algorithm 1032 years to crack SHA-256 or SHA3-256. That is longer than the universe has existed.
As The Register adds: “Even if you didn’t care about the circuit footprint and used a billion-hash-per-second Bitcoin-mining ASIC, the calculation still seems to be in the order of 1029 years.”
SHA-2 is the set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the National Security Agency (NSA), an intelligence branch of the US government under scrutiny for ubiquitous surveillance due to revelations released by Edward Snowden. SHA stands for “Secure Hash Algorithm.”
These hash functions represent mathematical operations run by digital means Cryptographic hash functions boast collision resistance, which means attackers cannot find two different input values that result in the same hash output. The SHA-2 family is comprised of altogether six hash functions with hash values that are 224, 256, 384 or 512 bits: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256.
SHA-256 and SHA-512 are novel hash functions computed with 32-bit and 64-bit words, respectively.
If humans were ever able to get their hands on just one asteroid, it would be a game-changer.
That’s because the value of many asteroids are measured in the quintillions of dollars, which makes the market for Earth’s annual production of raw metals – about $660 billion per year – look paltry in comparison.
The reality is that the Earth’s crust is saddled with uneconomic materials, while certain types of asteroids are almost pure metal. X-type asteroids, for example, are thought to be the remnants of large asteroids that were pulverized in collisions in which their dense, metallic cores got separated from the mantle.
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“A new floating solar photovoltaic system in Singapore is just one hectare in size and is meant as a prototype. But it could help usher in a new wave of PV placements on water resources globally.”
Come “ask me anything” right now!!! I’m trying to answer all questions I get asked:
Hi Reddit,
Thank you for having me here. My name is Zoltan Istvan, and I’m a futurist, journalist, and science fiction writer. I’m also the 2016 Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.
For the last 725 days, I have been campaigning full time to spread transhumanism and life extension policies across America and the world. While I never expected to win the US Presidency, my campaign has received a lot of attention—both good and bad—for its emphasis on radical science, technology, secularism, and futurist ideas.
China plans to launch its first e-commerce satellite in 2017, with the primary purpose of using satellite data in agriculture.
The plan was announced on Monday during an international aviation and aerospace forum in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, China Aerospace Museum and Juhuasuan, an arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba.
“In an era of space economy, the potential of a commercial space industry is immeasurable,” Han Qingping, president of the Chinarocket Co., Ltd, said at the forum.
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By now, most Bitcoin and Blockchain enthusiasts are aware of four looming issues that threaten the conversion of Bitcoin from an instrument of academics, criminal activity, and closed circle communities into a broader instrument that is fungible, private, stable, ubiquitous and recognized as a currency—and not just an investment unit or a transaction instrument.
These are the elephants in the room:
- Unleashing high-volume and speedy transactions
- Governance and the concentration of mining influence among pools, geography or special interests
- Privacy & Anonymity
- Dwindling mining incentives (and the eventual end of mining). Bitcoin’s design eventually drops financial incentives for transaction validation. What then?
As an Op-Ed pundit, I value original content. But the article, below, on Bitcoin fungibility, and this one on the post-incentive era, are a well-deserved nod to inspired thinking by other writers on issues that loom over the cryptocurrency community.
This article at Coinidol comes from an unlikely source: Jacob Okonya is a graduate student in Uganda. He is highly articulate, has a keen sense of market economics and the evolution of technology adoption. He is also a quick study and a budding columnist.
What Happens When Bitcoin Mining Rewards Diminish To Zero?
Jacob addresses this last issue with clarity and focus. I urge Wild Ducks to read it. My response, below touches on both issues 3 and 4 in the impromptu list, above.
Sunset mining incentives—and also the absence of supporting fully anonymous transactions—are two serious deficiencies in Bitcoin today.
I am confident that both shortcomings will be successfully addressed and resolved.
Thoughts about Issues #3 and #4: [Disclosure] I sit on the board at CRYPSA and draft whitepapers and position statements.*
Blockchain Building: Dwindling Incentives
Financial incentives for miners can be replaced by non-financial awards, such as recognition, governance, gaming, stakeholder lotteries, and exchange reputation points. I am barely scratching the surface. Others will come up with more creative ideas.
Last year, at the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, Keynote speaker Andreas Antonopoulos expressed confidence that Bitcoin will survive the sunset of miner incentives. He proposed some novel methods of ongoing validation incentives—most notably, a game theory replacement. Of course, another possibility is the use of very small transaction fees to continue financial incentives.
Personally, I doubt that direct financial incentives—in the form of microcash payments— will be needed. Ultimately, I envision an ecosystem in which everyone who uses Bitcoin to buy, sell, gift, trade, or invest will avoid fees while creating fluidity—by sharing the CPU burden. All users will validate at least one Blockchain transaction for every 5 transactions of their own.
Today, that burden is complex by design, because it reflects increasing competition to find a diminishing cache of unmined coins. But without that competition, the CPU overhead will be trivial. In fact, it seems likely that a validation mechanism could be built into every personal wallet and every mobile device app. The potential for massive crowd-sourced scrutiny has the added benefit of making the blockchain more robust: Trusted, speedy, and resistant to attack.
Transaction Privacy & Anonymity
Bitcoin’s lack of rock-solid, forensic-thwarting anonymity is a weak point that must ultimately be addressed. It’s not about helping criminals, it’s about liberty and freedoms. Detectives & forensic labs have classic methods of pursuing criminals. It is not our job to offer interlopers an identity, serial number and traceable event for every transaction.
Anonymity can come in one of three ways. Method #3 is least desirable:
- Add complex, multi-stage, multi-party mixing to every transaction—including random time delays, and parsing out fragments for real purchases and payments. To be successful, mixing must be ubiquitous. That is, it must be active with every wallet and every transaction by default. Ideally, it should even be applied to idle funds. This thwarts both forensic analysis
and earnest but misguided attempts to create a registry of ‘tainted’ coins. - Fork by consensus: Add anonymizing technology by copying a vetted, open source alt-coin
- Migrate to a new coin with robust, anonymizing tech at its core. To be effective, it must respect all BTC stakeholders with no other ownership, pre-mined or withheld distribution. Of course, it must be open, transparent and permissionless—with an opportunity and incentive for all users to be miners, or more specifically, to be bookkeepers.
That’s my opinion on the sunset of mining incentives and on transaction anonymity.
—What’s yours?
* Philip Raymond is co-chair of the Cryptocurrency Standards
Association. He was host and MC for the Bitcoin Event in New York.