asciilifeform: lolk

asciilifeform: while we're on subj, what exactly stops ben_vulpes from ordering his minions around via a net pipe ?

asciilifeform: your software co. ben_vulpes

asciilifeform: why do you have to ~go~ to it

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: aaah so the usual wife-escape lol

asciilifeform would not believe that this is a thing, if he had not worked with at least a dozen of d00dz who admitted to it

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: at one point city was digging up water pipes on my street, drill all day long, i would go elsewhere. how is this not 'escape' ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: waiwu

asciilifeform: t

asciilifeform: from where he will get it? time machine ?

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: did not only not care to sit and watch, but to listen, hence went elsewhere. which from ben_vulpes's description, he is doing also, but from wife, not from drills

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aaah yes.

asciilifeform: догоним и перегоним.

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i admit, i watched for a spell.

asciilifeform: but once you've seen 3 sections of pipe replaced, you've seen'em all

asciilifeform: however i probably ~could~ (and at one point did) watch planes take off , all day. so point taken.

asciilifeform: in other lelz, http://www.socialmatter.net/2017/02/13/communism-fondly-remembered-longing-tradition

asciilifeform: '...by the time that the communist states actually fell, they weren’t to the left of the American mainstream: they were to the right.'

asciilifeform: turns out there are worse things than impotently verbose brezhnev, whod'vethunkit

asciilifeform: it exists in the same way that the weight of mt.everest exists, even if there is no scale to weight it on.

asciilifeform: *weigh it

asciilifeform: you can make a true statement about it -- e.g., 'eisenhower era's american mainstream did not include tulpas and transpuppies; obummer's -- does'

asciilifeform: statements of ~psychiatric~ fact are tricky (see also thread, http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-07#1579090 ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: just earlier mircea_popescu had a thread re 'in 1970s chix did not yet wash properly' -- this is distinct from 'cultural mainstream' ? how so

asciilifeform: cultural as in http://btcbase.org/log/2016-09-08#1537241 ? ☝︎

asciilifeform: the louse is small, but mass, he has.

asciilifeform: the habit that guarantees the louse, however, has no mass.

asciilifeform: 'lice are fact of life' is a notion, not merely the absence of one

asciilifeform: if i had to pick between, e.g., jonathan swift's, lice, or the life of homo walmarticus, it would not be a hard choice to go with the former

asciilifeform: i'm still trying to puzzle out if i even disagree with mircea_popescu , upstack

asciilifeform: dunno that all of the barbarians had ~same~ barbarism, tho. and you need a word to refer to the differences.

asciilifeform: if some women grew from girls, and others - from abused iguanas, we would probably keep around a word to refer to the 2 types

asciilifeform: ^ kindergarten basic

asciilifeform: but the greeks only had access to a few types of hurrdurr

asciilifeform: and rome went to china. it ~didn't take.

asciilifeform: seems plausible.

asciilifeform: maybe hernan cortes beat him.

asciilifeform: this is what 'for entomologists only' is about

asciilifeform: to 'civilian' -- 'ew, bugs'; but to the d00d who has to pick the right type of organophosphate to spray -- they are 1,001 species.

asciilifeform: at one point it was possible to distinguish, at the very least, dextro- from laevo-rotary cockroaches - e.g., the 'ten things canned ammo vendors don't want you to know! and the forty methods of instant prayer healing with colloidal silver!' -- vs -- 'save AFRICA!!1 from climate!'

asciilifeform: the two groups described virtually never meet , in usa, they have separate lolmarts to shop in, separate fishwraps to read, etc.

asciilifeform: was thinking of the inmates, not the jailers

asciilifeform: mno

asciilifeform: point!

asciilifeform: incidentally, i gotta wonder, who specifically is responsible for the 'fourty-one things THEY DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW about $idiocy' crapolade that has displaced ~all other ads on www ? it even exists in ru .

asciilifeform: but same idiocy, on ~every~ 'mainstream' www.

asciilifeform: not simply similar, but ~same~

asciilifeform: nuts.

asciilifeform: the disconnect from actual 'turkey usd' reality must be total.

asciilifeform: not even 'severe', as in a schizophrenic's disconnect, but total, as in vegetable.

asciilifeform: dun worry mod6

asciilifeform: i didnt make anything fit for memorializing in Soba this mo

asciilifeform: ty mod6 .

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620408 << lel, wasn't he the d00d with the 'btc bank card' ☝︎

asciilifeform: even went to mircea_popescu's c1

asciilifeform: and then evaporated

asciilifeform: actually this is a mega-snoar, looks like the makers used 100% western toolchain, even macrocells ☟︎

asciilifeform: even so i'd buy one

asciilifeform: (but fat chance of finding!)

asciilifeform: oh hey lol they licensed the core!

asciilifeform: woah

asciilifeform: circus-grade

asciilifeform: in yet-other western tech, https://archive.is/YcSdC << 'A mid-2016 security incident led to Apple purging its data centers of servers built by Supermicro, including returning recently purchased systems... ... A source familiar with the case at Apple told Ars that the compromised firmware affected servers in Apple's design lab, and not active Siri servers. The firmware, according to the source, was downloaded directly from Supermicro's

asciilifeform: '

asciilifeform: ...Supermicro's support site—and that firmware is still hosted there.'

asciilifeform: re upstack -- i actually have here an earlier mips from imagination co. -- it is notbad.jpg (tested back in the day as potential pogo replacement)

asciilifeform: from shinohai's link , 'Microsoft, Intel, banks form Enterprise Ethereum blockchain alliance'

asciilifeform: didjaknow.

asciilifeform: https://zeptobars.com/en/read/Espressif-ESP8266-wifi-serial-rs232-ESP8089-IoT << oh hey

asciilifeform: this d00d never rests

asciilifeform: 1000s of die pr0nz

asciilifeform: https://zeptobars.com/en/read/bitfury-bitcoin-mining-chip << such as

asciilifeform: so far mircea_popescu is the people-bringin' champ

asciilifeform: ( asciilifeform batting 0 / N to date )

asciilifeform: maybe hanbot ?

asciilifeform: https://archive.is/gRPSR << meanwhile, in prng lulz !

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, mod6 , et al : meanwhile, http://nosuchlabs.com/pub/with_cache_yet_moar.txt

asciilifeform: lolk

asciilifeform: (subj can wait for eons, really, it's a running log of crapolade timer)

asciilifeform: iirc BingoBoingo is normally found in missouri

asciilifeform: aha, unless recently moved

asciilifeform: hello omraphantom

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: friend of yours from meatspace ?

asciilifeform: '@aeliasen @gnupg for fingerprints collisions are not interesting. There is no known preimage attack for SHA1. Keep calm and use OpenPGP.' << lel

asciilifeform has been thinking very seriously about how to make http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol correctly; and is quite bugged by the fact that ~verification~ is O(N)

asciilifeform: eventually (given death of moore's law, already long ago) the minimal practical time will exceed the block interval, and then mega-headache.

asciilifeform: in fact verification from-genesis is O(N^2) !

asciilifeform: actually worse than N^2

asciilifeform: if you already live on mars, there is no problem in flying to mars, yes.

asciilifeform: but if standing up a brand-new node from scratch, with full verification (rather than dumb bitwise copy of existing node) takes a century...

asciilifeform: what's that

asciilifeform: an inevitable visaification, The Guild of The Three Nodes, etc, at t-->inf, is a downer.

asciilifeform: mining != verification.

asciilifeform: i posted one just the other day (granted it wasn't 'any redditard', but wotronic)

asciilifeform: anyone can bang on a keyboard, some folx still get paid for it, others -- not.

asciilifeform: circus bear -- can bang.

asciilifeform: as i currently understand it, mircea_popescu's algo had two major effects -- a) nodes have something valuable to sell b) all users are protocolically forced to retain all blocks

asciilifeform: users who want to verify blocks

asciilifeform: that is to say, all sane people

asciilifeform: gotta store.

asciilifeform: what is 'user' distinct from 'node operator' ?

asciilifeform: a goxhead ?

asciilifeform: tx author who has no node of his own == shaved monkey

asciilifeform: O(N^2) verification of each incoming block, is even worse of a 'heat death' rate than of traditional bitcoin

asciilifeform: (which is closer to O(NlogN)

asciilifeform: )

asciilifeform: convergence to handful of massive google-like datacenters for ~nodes~ -- not miners, but also nodes -- is inherently usgistic imho.

asciilifeform: this is an open problem, because 'miners don't need the blocks' is also imho intolerable.

asciilifeform: it needs a fundamental breakthrough, i suspect.

asciilifeform: didn't mircea_popescu find a new chocolate icecream shop! he oughta go there, eat some, come back with theorem.

asciilifeform: maybe as good!

asciilifeform: but before he does:

asciilifeform: say the miner has to find a string in an old block , as part of mining, that fits a nonce-derived pattern.

asciilifeform: for sake of argument, an F, such that a substring S of old block B makes F(nonce + B) = true.

asciilifeform: this is verifiable in O(1)

asciilifeform: but requires access to all old blocks, to search for.

asciilifeform: depending on how you make F, he does need to examine all blocks.

asciilifeform: (and even then may turn up short, and have to go back for a new nonce)

asciilifeform: it can be made as painful as the hashing is to begin with

asciilifeform: in the same way.

asciilifeform: how's that

asciilifeform: the cheat -- works. say your hash is a keccak that eats 512b blocks and produces 512b block.

asciilifeform: the nonce is Q. miner has to now find an old block that , treated with the above walk, contains F(Q). and point to the block # and the requisite offset .

asciilifeform: open problem. betcha one can find the pill for this.,

asciilifeform: .

asciilifeform: (for instance, can demand that the miner find a Q that depends only on the parts of the block he cannot easily spin.)

asciilifeform: O(N^2) verification suxxx.

asciilifeform: gotta find a finesse around it.

asciilifeform: or you get an algae globe

asciilifeform: or whatever that toy is called

asciilifeform: the one that blooms for a bit, and dies.

asciilifeform adjusts beak mask.

asciilifeform goes into the pit, bbl.

asciilifeform: ooook try this on for size : suppose fixed-width TX (as discussed earlier.) T(N) is the Nth tx, T(0) is the first tx in genesis block, etc. Tmax is the last tx in the currentheightblock. ☟︎

asciilifeform: T(N) is an O(1) fetch, as spoken of earlier.

asciilifeform: say every new block , to be valid, must contain a tx-sized slot (not covered by the nonce hash, but see below) that is computed as follows:

asciilifeform: T( nonce mod Tmax ) xor T ( H(nonce) mod Tmax ) xor T ( H(H(nonce)) mod Tmax ).

asciilifeform: there is no way to practically compute this value without having a copy of the blockchain. and it also ends up being luby-transformable into any one of the 3 old tx if you have the other 2. a kind of perpetual redundancy in the storage . ☟︎

asciilifeform: this also entirely annihilates the possibility that a future enemy could monkey with contents of old blocks by finding hash collisions.

asciilifeform: theoretically it also means that a tx, as time goes to infinity, will have infinite number of confirmations...

asciilifeform: (statistically speaking, any sequence of blocks, will eventually end up luby-coded into future blocks ! )

asciilifeform: in above example, the 'arity' of the xor is 3. and mircea_popescu will probably answer, when he comes back , that evil miner will waltz the nonce until the 3 necessary tx are the ones that fit in his pocket. but arity doesn't have to be 3.

asciilifeform: what remains is to compute the minimal arity for the attack to be impractical. and prove said fact.

asciilifeform: (either this, or simply replace 'nonce' in the equation, with a Z, that is equal to a hash over the ~transactions in the candidate block~, considerably more painful to waltz than the nonce )

asciilifeform: now challenge for the reader !

asciilifeform: suppose that tx's (recall, fixed width) position in the block, is also kept inside it. (e.g., tx # 100 will start with a 16bit field containing 0x0064 .)

asciilifeform: and we have the luby transform above.

asciilifeform: what is the complexity of actually fetching the Nth tx , if you can also make use of the T(...)xorT(...)xorT(...) in every block.

asciilifeform: .... another pill against 'waltzers' : Z depends on the ~previous~ block. ☟︎

asciilifeform: ( Z from here-on in this gedankenexperiment is simply a value that determines which 3 -- if arity==3 -- old tx's get xor'd )

asciilifeform bbl.

asciilifeform: as far as i can see, this solves. Z depends on previous block, and the xor'd output is ~covered~ by the hash (and nonce) of the currently-worked-on block. so miner cannot craft his Z, he is forced to suck it up.

asciilifeform: (and he cannot even begin to work on a block until he knows Z and goes, fetches the required old tx ! no other miner has any incentive to help him do this.)

asciilifeform: quite the opposite.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fixed-width tx buys us this algo. but not only it. for instance, an adult tx's unique index can be quite short : blknum_txoffset. this in turn saves space elsewhere, for all time.

asciilifeform: for folx tuned in : it also makes the cask thing possible, but the latter is wholly separate, optional algo, it is possible to use traditional mempools with this scheme

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it doesn't have to be capped at 2, either, unless you use casks and want to leave room for dozen+ hop stages

asciilifeform: (or unless you want to make blocks ~very~ compact)

asciilifeform: tru!!

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: describe, for my education, how Proper ring signature differs from shamir's

asciilifeform: reviewing definition of ring sig : some process , whereby a signature S can be verified against keys K1, K2, ... KN , but without revealing which K had produced it

asciilifeform: aha, looks like we're on same page

asciilifeform: let's try to at least put it on paper, what would be this squared circle

asciilifeform: as i understand, what mircea_popescu would like is : V(K1, S)=false, V(K2, S)=false, .... BUT V(K1,K2,..,KN, S) = true

asciilifeform: ^ ?

asciilifeform: how, hypothetically, would S be produced

asciilifeform: by owner of a particular K strictly ?

asciilifeform: 'all for one an' one for all'

asciilifeform: now let's say we have this primitive. how do you make, out of it, a bitcoinlike

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: even supposing that you had this, if you actually needed all pubkeys in use to-date to verify a sig... it'll be painful

asciilifeform: ah

asciilifeform: well yes, it'll eat linearly moar cycles, to verify

asciilifeform: not necessarily

asciilifeform: it'd work, naturally, if the algo actually ~needed~ all of the pubkeys

asciilifeform: because the signing process likewise took in all of'em

asciilifeform: reminds me of how one breaks shamir's ring

asciilifeform: *remind me of how

asciilifeform: plz

asciilifeform: graph isomerism zkp ?

asciilifeform: ( as in, say, these : http://web.mit.edu/~ezyang/Public/graph/svg.html )

asciilifeform: can't seem to find ~this~, either

asciilifeform: nono we had this

asciilifeform: i actually worked with this notion last year, when investigating nonretarded (i.e. of provable complexity) block ciphering. and came to same realization that mircea_popescu is probably about to come to

asciilifeform: ( spoiler : can't prove the hardness of magicking ~your particular~ graph. )

asciilifeform: rsa doesn't pretend to a known complexity class tho.

asciilifeform: graph-circuit appeals because it -- does

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-06#1477755 << it ? ☝︎

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-03-20#1436710 << another thread re subj ☝︎

asciilifeform: it keeps coming back ☟︎

asciilifeform: i walked compendia of known np-hard/np-complete problems, and found that all of them had same hole

asciilifeform: i.e. no known algo for constructing a known problem--solution pair, using rng, of ~known~ average complexity.

asciilifeform: incidentally ~all of the material is circa 1970s.

asciilifeform: (at least, of the public material!)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i think i found it : http://btcbase.org/log/2016-02-05#1396876 ☝︎

asciilifeform: the thread.

asciilifeform: ( next day, http://btcbase.org/log/2016-02-06#1397621 moar .) ☝︎

asciilifeform: maybe it was a pm convo

asciilifeform: but evidently not with asciilifeform , because it dun turn up there

asciilifeform: yes!

asciilifeform: theeere

asciilifeform: metoo, i was quite convinced that i lost a set of l0gz to bitrot

asciilifeform: (and on raid5 no less)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let's suppose you had ring signature, we have edge of the sword. how does the hilt work ? i.e. you have an output, that is spendable, but you want it spendable by ~you~, not by 1,001 randomly-selected pubkeys.

asciilifeform: what's the spendability condition ?

asciilifeform: oook i getit

asciilifeform: the good noose : i don't know a proof that you ~can't~ do this...

asciilifeform: and yeah this is the squared-circle from couplaedaysago

asciilifeform: the crackpots have been at it since before chaum,

asciilifeform: and the charlatans -- since; and quite vigorously

asciilifeform: (recall the zero-whatvrs, how many of those alts by now.)

asciilifeform: can anybody remind me of how shamir&rivest's original algo fails

asciilifeform: (it nominally solved this problem)

asciilifeform: all i recall is old thread, http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-30#1532069 ☝︎

asciilifeform: ^ where my contention was, you can factor out the signer using multiple sets of shamirized sigs

asciilifeform: by process of elimination .

asciilifeform: say, today, k3, k4, k7, ... , k9 sign. tomorrow, k7, k21, k3, ... , k333. next day, k42, k3, ... whatever. now 'you can't verify that no subgroup...' ~within~ the algo, but someone who has the whole list and notices that only k3 recurrs...

asciilifeform: if he has half a brain -- knows which k.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: how's that. the seekrit, is blown, neh

asciilifeform: i suspect so

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: would be interesting to tally the avg case cost of not committing this error.

asciilifeform: (of guarantee of not committing it)

asciilifeform: there's computables and there's computables-and-doables. unfortunately distinct sets in practice.

asciilifeform: (if you need a jupiter-sized machine, it isn't very hotstuff algo-wise)

asciilifeform: dunno re mircea_popescu's planet, on mine, semiconductors sorta stopped, in 2009-ish, and aren't threatening to develop mega-improvement

asciilifeform: you will find that many 'wouldn't that be useful..' items are ~entirely absent in the public lit. and no prizes for guessing why.

asciilifeform: i dug for the can-guarantee-avg-case-np-hard? thing -- found zip.

asciilifeform: ( asciilifeform also has pretty strong bias against mechanically-complicated crypto. )

asciilifeform: it is very easy to 'zerocoin'erize.

asciilifeform: (or was it zcashulation ? )

asciilifeform: i can never keep the 2 straight.

asciilifeform: oh lol that chick

asciilifeform: she's in the l0gz

asciilifeform: to revisit the smoke grenade -- how do you deal with the unopposability of having paid for something ?

asciilifeform: or does payee get told the secret over separate (say, rsa'd) channel

asciilifeform: because that'd work

asciilifeform: (in so far as payee can be trusted to stfu forever)

asciilifeform: the amts aren't secret, per the scheme, though

asciilifeform: someone else can pay him same amt. and then to whom does he send the plutonium.

asciilifeform: well not quite, we do store the pgp'd orders

asciilifeform: i guess this isn't one of the problems.

asciilifeform: ( i can't think of any reason why payee would care if payer A, or B, had supplied the agreed-upon amount )

asciilifeform: so long as they are guaranteed to be distinct at every step in time

asciilifeform: well yes, this'd be implicit in ring sig.

asciilifeform: !#s martian bank

asciilifeform: ( http://btcbase.org/log/2016-10-20#1557335 thread , and elsewhere ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: btw 'no payers, only payments' is probably impossible with public balances existing in any sense.

asciilifeform: if balances are visible -- anyone can see that addr A had a payment-P-shaped chunk subtracted from it at time T.

asciilifeform: esp. if everyone is in the habit of using all of the decimal places of P as an invoice id.

asciilifeform: i suppose this is why mircea_popescu wanted the 2-input thing.

asciilifeform: how do you verify without public balances ?

asciilifeform: now you also want homomorphic arithmetic, looks like

asciilifeform: 'we're squaring circles, may as well make perpetuum mobile and immortality'

asciilifeform: can third party calculate the monetary mass ?

asciilifeform: because if not , you have the fed.

asciilifeform: valid also means 'nobody gets to printolade'

asciilifeform: which means that i gotta be able to prove that monetary mass is what the mining curve says it is. and not something else.

asciilifeform: that doesn't prove that monetary mass was not somehow added during noncoinbase ops

asciilifeform: i.e. that some output, somewhere, yielded moar coin than the sum of the inputs.

asciilifeform: that's more or less equivalent to my question

asciilifeform: which is , how would you have such a thing as a sanely-behaving balance to begin with

asciilifeform: one simple way to do this, is to dispense with amounts (as discussed in at least 2 old threads)

asciilifeform: i.e. danielpbarron's vectors

asciilifeform: no moar coin breaking.

asciilifeform: think dubloons, rather than pieces-of-eight.

asciilifeform: amounts suck.

asciilifeform: it is one of the major leaks in the vacuum piping

asciilifeform: in that one party creates the sharp broken edge, but very other people have to live with the cost.

asciilifeform: ~100% of asciilifeform's line of thought re 'trbi', from this, to the casks thing, etc., was only 'how to plug the leaks'

asciilifeform: what are ~all~ of the places where A has the ecstasy, but B does the laundry, where A!=B ☟︎

asciilifeform: oooh gotta revisit upstack, briefly, http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620677 << ~this~ in particular cannot be done as written. else, the first relayer of a freshly mined block could simply steal the work that went into determining luby(Z) and get massive head start on making his own block, which he then relays instead of the plagiarized. ☝︎

asciilifeform: (the fact that the original victim could, normally, relay his original faster than a typical plagiarist could hash, is immaterial, it is still a potential vuln)

asciilifeform: and actually now that i think about it, it'd be guaranteed-lethal

asciilifeform: the plagiarist can make a block with higher PoW than the victim, ~every time, since he isn't handicapped by having to compute L(Z)

asciilifeform: and reorg will favour him.

asciilifeform: (so L ~must~ use current block.)