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Category: encryption – Page 63

The National Security Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn’t know is just how much information the whistleblower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access. Read more

Cryptocurrency aficionados have been discussing Bitcoin limitations ever since the blockchain buzz hit the street. Geeks toss around ideas for clearing transactions faster, resisting potential attacks, rewarding miners after the last coin is mined, and supporting anonymity (or the opposite—if you lean toward the altcoinsdark side). There are many areas in which Bitcoin could be improved, or made more conducive to one camp or another.

Distinguished Penn State professor, John Carroll, believes that Bitcoin may eventually be marginalized due to its early arrival. He believes that its limitations will eventually be overcome by newer “altcoins”, presumably with improved mechanisms.

So, does progress in any of these areas threaten the reigning champ? It’s unlikely…

Andreas-transparentMore than any other individual, Andreas Antonopoulos is the face of Bitcoin. We discussed this very issue in the outer lobby of the MIT Bitcoin Expo at which he was keynote speaker (March 2015). Then, we discussed it again, when I hosted his presentation at The Bitcoin Event in New York (also in March). He clearly and succinctly explained to me why it is unlikely that an altcoin will replace Bitcoin as the dominant—and eventually surviving—cryptocurrency…

It is not simply that Bitcoin was first or derived from Satoshi’s original paper, although this clearly established precedent, propelled it into the media, and ignited a grassroots industry. More importantly, Bitcoin is unlikely to be surpassed by an altcoin because:

  1. Bitcoin is open source. It is difficult enough for skeptics to trust that an open source protocol can be trusted. Users, businesses, banks, exchanges and governments may eventually trust a distributed, open source movement. After all, math is more trustworthy and less transient than governments. Math cannot inflate itself, bend to political winds, or print future generations into debt if it is tied to a cap. But it is unlikely that these same skeptics will allow an inventor with a proprietary mechanism to take custody of their wealth, or one in which the content of all wallets cannot be traced back to the origin.
  2. If we accept #1 (that a viable contender must be open source and either public or freely licensed), then Bitcoin developers or wallet vendors are free to incorporate the best protocols and enhancements from the alt-developers. They can gradually be folded into Bitcoin and adopted by consensus. This is what Gavin and the current developers at Bitcoin Prime do. They protect, enhance, extend, and promote. Looked at another way, when a feature or enhancement is blessed—and when 3 or 4 of the leading 7 wallets honor it, it becomes part of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has achieved a two-sided network effect, just like Acrobat PDF. Unseating an entrenched two-sided network requires disruptive technology and implementation with clear benefits. But in the case of a widely distributed, trusted and universally adopted tool (such as a public-use monetary instrument), a contender must be open source. The Cryptocurrency Standards Association, The Bitcoin Foundation and the leading wallet vendors have always been open and eager to incorporate the best open source ideas into Bitcoin.

Even if Bitcoin were replaced by an altcoin or by “Bitcoin 2.0”, it is likely that the public would only migrate to the enhanced coin if it were tied to the original equity corpus of earned and mined coins from the Bitcoin era. That is, we all know that Satoshi may have thousands of original Bitcoins, but few among us would tolerate (a) losing all of our Bitcoin value, and (b) rewarding a blockchain wannabe who declares that his coins are worth more than the grassroots legacy of vested millions that came before.

string_can_phoneConsider Prof Carroll’s analogy: “Who will use an acoustic string telephone when he could access a mobile phone.” A more accurate analogy is the evolution of the 32 year old AMPS phone network (the first widely deployed cell phone network). In 1983, the original phones were analogue and limited to 400 channels. Like their non-cellular predecessors, user equipment was bulky. Phones were divided into bulky components in the trunk, under the seat and a corded handset. They lacked GPS, LTE and many signaling features that we now take for granted. Yet carriers, equipment manufacturers and users were never forced to throw away equipment and start over. The network grew, adopted, and yielded incentives for incremental user-equipment upgrade.

With all due respect to the distinguished Penn State professor, John Carroll, I stand with Andreas. Bitcoin need’t relinquish the throne. It is evolving!

Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards Association and CEO of Vanquish Labs.
This is his first article for Lifeboat Foundation

Related: Stellar & Ripple: Pretender to Bitcoin throne?

Vires in Bitcoin
Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.

To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.

Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.

Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.

This means that even the smallest change creates a completely different digest. This is called the “avalanche effect”. Also, the chances of generating the same digest from a transformed message are a tad rare. This is called “collision resistance”.

Such nature of Bitcoin’s hash function makes it impossible to change records and transactions once they have been documented. As soon as the hashes are hashed together within the blockchain, counterfeiting records of transactions is no way near possible.

Then there’s the technology of wallet software. This is where people store bitcoins and use for making transactions. The wallet system is set in which users are prohibited from spending the same units twice (double-spending) by checking new transactions against the blockchain and against other new transactions to ensure the same units are not being cited more than once.

Though this system was established to avoid fraudulent activities and has proven to be an effective one, it also became an ideal scenario for hacking attacks on a Bitcoin exchange that aim to steal bitcoins. It’s because once bitcoins are lost, they’re gone for good and there’s no way of reclaiming them, especially that cryptocurrency usage is not covered by the central government and other intermediary parties like banks. Nonetheless, it’s not totally the Bitcoin’s fault; it’s the Bitcoin exchanges’ security measures.

New Book: An Irreverent Singularity Funcyclopedia, by Mondo 2000’s R.U. Sirius.

Posted by Rob Chamberlain in 3D printing, alien life, automation, big data, bionic, bioprinting, biotech/medical, complex systems, computing, cosmology, cryptocurrencies, cybercrime/malcode, cyborgs, defense, disruptive technology, DNA, driverless cars, drones, economics, electronics, encryption, energy, engineering, entertainment, environmental, ethics, existential risks, exoskeleton, finance, first contact, food, fun, futurism, general relativity, genetics, hacking, hardware, human trajectories, information science, innovation, internet, life extension, media & arts, military, mobile phones, nanotechnology, neuroscience, nuclear weapons, posthumanism, privacy, quantum physics, robotics/AI, science, security, singularity, software, solar power, space, space travel, supercomputing, time travel, transhumanism

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”

Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial…yers-2030/

Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

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Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/

Corporate Reconnoitering?

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Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

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Quoted: “Ethereum will also be a decentralised exchange system, but with one big distinction. While Bitcoin allows transactions, Ethereum aims to offer a system by which arbitrary messages can be passed to the blockchain. More to the point, these messages can contain code, written in a Turing-complete scripting language native to Ethereum. In simple terms, Ethereum claims to allow users to write entire programs and have the blockchain execute them on the creator’s behalf. Crucially, Turing-completeness means that in theory any program that could be made to run on a computer should run in Ethereum.” And, quoted: “As a more concrete use-case, Ethereum could be utilised to create smart contracts, pieces of code that once deployed become autonomous agents in their own right, executing pre-programmed instructions. An example could be escrow services, which automatically release funds to a seller once a buyer verifies that they have received the agreed products.”

Read Part One of this Series here » Ethereum — Bitcoin 2.0? And, What Is Ethereum.

Read Part Two of this Series here » Ethereum — Opportunities and Challenges.

Read Part Three of this Series here » Ethereum — A Summary.

Quoted: “Bitcoin technology offers a fundamentally different approach to vote collection with its decentralized and automated secure protocol. It solves the problems of both paper ballot and electronic voting machines, enabling a cost effective, efficient, open system that is easily audited by both individual voters and the entire community. Bitcoin technology can enable a system where every voter can verify that their vote was counted, see votes for different candidates/issues cast in real time, and be sure that there is no fraud or manipulation by election workers.”

Read the article here » http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239809?hootPostID=ba473f…aacc8412c7