asciilifeform: bz-bzzz. where are the other flies on this dusty space rock...
asciilifeform: dollars to doughnuts, hypothetical 'superminer' would be an ultimately analog system. with no well-understood explanation for why it works.
asciilifeform: exciting, until you realize 1) it won't happen, and 2) it must
asciilifeform: just try telling people: 'yes, you'll have to throw away your RAM. and every line of code anyone's ever written.'
asciilifeform: don't worry, not much risk of it actually happening in real life.
asciilifeform: mod6: once you understand how much of what you presently know will be irrelevant (actually, harmful) after a serious rethinking of computing, you'll shit yourself.
asciilifeform: this kind of thing has to be done from silicon up.
asciilifeform: a 'from scratch' OS on top of the world's 2nd biggest steaming turd is a bad thing, regardless of how close it can be brought to an approximation of working, through brute sweat.
asciilifeform: there is such a thing as an 'impedance mismatch.'
asciilifeform: the idea of implementing something on urbit would be more interesting if the thing actually worked.
asciilifeform: all entirely unnecessary, and crap i want no part of.
asciilifeform: now he and the merry band are fighting memory leaks, inexplicable crashes, and other joys.
asciilifeform: that is, players agree on what constitutes a 'go' signal, and arrive at a set of split secrets that can be added up to said signal, verifiably - without a dealer.
asciilifeform: for extra points: 'byzantine' scheme, sans dealer.
asciilifeform: well, dealer presumably has the key being split
asciilifeform: that is, for all pubkeys, for each - can prove that it is a share. and that no others exist.
asciilifeform: exercise for the (very) alert reader: come up with a scheme where you can prove the actual number of distinct shareholders, given their pubkeys (allowed to assume they aren't all sockpuppets)
asciilifeform: simplest way i can think of is rsa with >2 private primes (lamport, or see MP's writeup)
asciilifeform: so k of m shares gives you key, but k-1 should give you bupkis.
asciilifeform: (must conjecture that trapdoors exist. naturally)
asciilifeform: if the shares are distinguishable from noise, they contain information which pertains to the key. (obvious.) hence said information must be a 'one way' ticket.
asciilifeform: what i meant was something rather more subtle
asciilifeform: mod6: that's true of any signature algo that uses a nonce
asciilifeform: (proof is an exercise for alert reader.)
asciilifeform: it (provably) 'does what's printed on the box.'
asciilifeform: if your application doesn't need the provability part, use ordinary (e.g. Shamir's) secret-splitter.
asciilifeform: normally in a secret-splitter, the individual shares are indistinguishable from noise.
asciilifeform: 'And the great fleas, themselves, in turn / Have greater fleas to go on; / While these again have greater still, / And greater still, and so on...'
asciilifeform: 'Big fleas have little fleas, / Upon their backs to bite 'em, / And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum...'
