I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them. How many people could have written the Cellebrite blog post? Probably not many. The hidden pressures on Signal staff must be enormous, as likely the the world's single most valuable surveillance target.
Adding MobileCoin to Signal really changed my perceptions about just how principled the Signal foundation really is. I have a lot of respect for much of Moxie’s work, but the MobileCoin thing is still a head-scratcher.
Why so? Moxie helped design MobileCoin. Besides, his recent post on web3 lays it bare what he thinks of it.
MobileCoin, in time, I hope grows up to be a credible alternative to Facebook's USDP (Diem), like how Signal is to WhatsApp. I don't think its inclusion a head-scratcher at all. If anything, I hope it serves its purpose well, and isn't unfairly regulated to oblivion.
I got the impression that his web3 post [0] only talks about token incentives, DAOs and other decentralisation for decentralisation's sake. There's no mention of MobileCoin, which I gather he just sees as tool to facilitate anonymous payments (it's a token on top of Stellar).
You're right, sorry I have misread this then. According to Wikipedia, MobileCoin uses its own blockchain based on mechanics from Stellar and Monero [0]. That also makes a lot more sense technically, and explains the supposed 4 years of development [1].
I balk at any mention of crypto as a rule (since the landscape is so saturated with hucksters) but I have to assume it is to provide a functionality similar to WhatsApp Pay, Venmo and whatever WeChat has.
Those in app type payments are a huge part of message app usage in some parts of the world where I am sure Signal would like to increase uptake.
Mobilecoin is a quasi-security and not a stablecoin. The price went 5X in the days before Signal announced that they have built MobileCoin integration (in secret).
In a way, crypto has given non-profits a way to take profits out to personal accounts.
I hate most of the cryptocurrency-bs, but mobilecoin seems to have been designed carefully to avoid most of the objectional aspects of blockchain stuff.
He sold an earlier company to Twitter, pretty sure he already is "rich" (most of us here are, comparatively).
I'd like to think about Moxie as the most honourable person in all of this. Leaving the CEO role could be a sign that he doesn't agree with everything that's going on.
I'm also very skeptical of all things crypto but you did mention principles and I think there is an angle of mobile coin that is clearly ideological and very much fits into Moxie's reputation.
That is to take the transfer of money away from old and large institutions.
The lure if getting rich by creating your own money is irresistible and thus corrosive. Even the most principled person will have difficulty ferreting out all the wats it undermines that integrity.
Meanwhile bitcoin serves that same purpose and much mire efficiently with lightning.
> I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them
Yes, and who has a better reputation for fighting for principles than Brian Acton, one of the guys who made Whatsapp and subsequently sold it to the most morally correct company in the world: Facebook.
Acton has had an interesting road since selling WhatsApp to Facebook. That includes leaving Facebook with $850 million USD in shares on the table for leaving early and telling people to delete their Facebook accounts. Looking at what he's done tells the story of someone who learned many lessons since he sold WhatsApp.
> That includes leaving Facebook with $850 million USD in shares on the table for leaving early and telling people to delete their Facebook accounts.
Honestly this action was one of the things that really made me like Acton. It was more than words. Granted, he already had a few billion dollars at that point -- and I'm under the opinion that $2bn isn't much different from $1bn (except bragging rights) (current work 2.8bn[0]) -- but it shows that money isn't his (only) motivating factor. It is also pretty hard to tell people to leave something you built.
i wonder if Acton figured that WhatsApp might lose to competitors and privacy-focused people would migrate to a new app anyways, and he could do more good with almost $1 billion.
There are two types of people in the world: those who sell their start ups for 16 billion, and those that dont have startups people are willing to pay 16 billion for.
I am very doubtful that very many people here would turn down that sort of money if given the opportunity. Its very easy to wax poetic about virtue when nobody is trying to tempt you.
> I am very doubtful that very many people here would turn down that sort of money if given the opportunity. Its very easy to wax poetic about virtue when nobody is trying to tempt you.
Indeed, not a lot of people would be able to turn that down. Moxie? That's one of them, that I like to believe they would though.
I mean, he walked away from $800 million in Facebook stock because his belief in privacy wouldn't allow him to continue working on WhatsApp, post-acquisition. I think that speaks louder than selling WhatsApp in the first place.
What he's been trying to do can also be interpreted as spending a few tens of millions here and there to generate PR with the goal of whitewashing his treachery when he sold out his WhatsApp userbase to Zuck and the most privacy invasive company on the planet...
I'm reminded of the old gag:
Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
Yes, of course!
Would you sleep with me for one dollar?
What kind of woman do you think I am?
We've already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.
Acton already whored himself out to Zuck for $19billion. We've established what kind of person he is.
It would be awfully hard to turn down nineteen billion dollars for the sale. The social ills caused by Facebook were also a little less undeniable in 2014.
Since the sale he has criticized the hell out of Facebook, too.
Sure, he isn't a martyr. But there are way way way worse behaviors in the valley.
This is my biggest concern. Hopefully the replacement will truly care about user privacy and have the balls to fight for it, even if it means going up against large (governmental) organizations.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
One thing you can do that's quite lucrative for someone is to generate all the keys corresponding to common dictionary words like "dog" and "cat". The way I know someone is doing this is I was testing some transactions and somehow whatever I was sending was immediately vanishing. So someone out there has taken a dictionary and done this already.
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which
is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years.
EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
"""Coincidentally, 2276709 is also the telephone number of a flat in Islington where Arthur once went to a party, met a nice girl, and lost her to a party-crasher. While the flat and telephone have been demolished along with Earth, they are forever linked to the fact that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect—against all odds—are rescued 29 seconds after being ejected from the Vogon spaceship."""
Hashing hardware capability is typically measured in trillions per second (TH/s) so the math might be better using trillion instead of billion. As I understand it, the rental cost of 1 PH/s (which I think is one-thousand-trillion?) is about $10/hour. From that I think you could work out an actual cost to generate a collision!
Even taking the smaller value of 463439129036942 billion years at 1 billion/second (and therefore 463439129036942000 years at a quadrillion/second), at $10 / hour / PH/s, that’s $4.06e22, or ≈ 480 million years of Earth’s 2020 global nominal GDP.
You could shorten that by recognising the address space is more like 2^160 in BTC, due to the address generation process, more than one private key can spend from a given address, technically.
Not easily, as you need to do an elliptic curve point x scalar multiplication, which takes tons of cycles on a CPU and even tons of gates on an ASIC. Please provide a link to hardware that can do it much faster...
Two or more of whatever you are using to perform the calculations? I mean it won't appreciably shorten the search time but it would double the processing rate.
I wonder if you could cut this down by focusing on know implementations and their random number generation. That is trying to figure out if weaker random number generation at any point was prevalent...
2^256 is a very large number. If you could build a computer that required a single atom, and could test the balance of a single account in a single nanosecond, and then converted the entirety of the earth into such computers, it would take ~2.8 million years for you to check 0.01% of all accounts.
Brute-forcing modern cryptography isn't something that can happen. The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe.
"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."
Look more carefully, the estimation according to Wikipedia is 10^80, which is roughly 2^266.
(BTW, when converting 10^x to 2^x, times 3 is what I use for very rough back of the envelope estimations. Times 10/3 is actually almost precise, as log2(10) = 3.32…)
This reminds me of a discussion a few years ago where someone was extremely adamant that you'd have to handle the chance of a key collision in a random 256-bit key for the system to be secure :)
> Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally... we are actually terrible at it
> leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity
Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.
YES. To put it crassly, it's like your brain is The Matrix.
I was driving the other day, thinking about reaction times and had the actual tangible feeling that I was just behind 'reality' because we don't actually see, feel, hear reality we see, hear, feel the brain's interpretation of it, and so it's ever so slightly behind 'actual' (are there variations in processing speed? And how do the fringes of these variations affect one's ability to exist in society?).
We are all living a very recent, rolling memory. Operating system loaded into RAM.
Related to this, I think the phenomenon of "being in the zone" is where the separation between reality and what we perceive of reality seems to get extra narrow (to the point of thinking that there isn't a separation between the two). In times like this, we tend to do things "without thinking" (such as in the case of athletes), but I suspect that we are either processing things (a background level of "thinking") so quickly that our minds can't/don't have time to explicitly form thoughts about reality and respond to these thoughts, so eventually they give up on doing these things during the duration of much of the remaining time in the zone, or so processing things so correctly (matching reality relatively better than in other times/contexts) that it's notable.
For one, the hubris of obviously-uninformed statements such as this one.
But more like: the inputs, processing, and outputs have much more complicated relationships than this causal chain that you have described. Modern neuroscience and research into NCC have shown that the brain, obviously, is not so simple.
yeah, those color illusions really demonstrate this. like when you stare at a point and the picture changes, the picture looks fully colored but in reality its turned black and white and your brain just hasnt realized it.
Donuts isn't a registrar, they're a company that got setup when ICANN started allowing anyone to apply to create gTLDs, and they really innovated on setting up tons of them for profit. They own the .company TLD.
Ah yeah and I’m noticing every .company gTLD has that same changed date so that’s actually not useful info.
The company being filed 9/1 is a bit suspicious, but I guess that’s a bit before the announcement. That companies manager matches the name at the bottom of this page so it’s definitely the same LLC
> To address risks to stablecoin users and guard against stablecoin runs, legislation should require stablecoin issuers to be insured depository institutions, which are subject to appropriate supervision and regulation, at the depository institution and the holding company level.
How does this interact with the concept of algorithmic stablecoins? Not every stablecoin is simply backed by deposits.
> How does this interact with the concept of algorithmic stablecoins? Not every stablecoin is simply backed by deposits.
Relegated to a footnote (just like Jeffery Snider at Alhambra Partners talks a lot of the typical chatter by frbny et al wrt the (euro)dollar system gets relegated to footnotes and nick named the phenomena "footnote dollars") on page 4:
"Stablecoins that are purportedly convertible for an underlying fiat currency are distinct from a smaller subset of stablecoin arrangements that use other means to attempt to stabilize the price of the instrument (sometimes referred to as “synthetic” or “algorithmic” stablecoins) or are convertible for other assets. Because of their more widespread adoption, this discussion focuses on stablecoins that are convertible for fiat currency."
i.e we'll pretend that people cant swap dollar denominated non centralized corporate issued stablecoins for any kind of fiat at the floating rate of the denomination of the stablecoins underlying to the fiat in typical fx markets (also ignoring that higher amount of those other stable coins are being used in defi protocols relative to their supply than the centralized ones).
So of course, those like FEI, FRAX and others will get ignored.
This is what I wonder, since I thought what most consider stablecoins now (like Tether) are basically steppingstones towards things like Maker/ Dai, which I am unsure how they would fit into this kind of regulation.
The primary targets here are going to be folks issuing stables backed by real world assets and fiat. Under-collateralized algo-stables will probably be targeted as securities by the SEC, while overcollaterized debt based ones will probably just be ignored for now because of how capital inefficient they are.
Excellent question, also synthetics. This is my big question. If you make fiat backed stable coins to onerous to manage, then everyone just moves to algorithmic stable coins.
I read your comment and then started reading about at MakerDAO's governance model. It doesn't jump out as a scam to me, just a clever bit of game theory.
I'm not the government or even a lawyer. But I'd imagine they'd block companies from trading Bitcoins for dollars or mining Bitcoin. Turn off all the ETFs and options trading. Say Tesla and MicroStrategy can't hold it in their treasury. I doubt they can make it disappear but that would certainly put a dent in US adoption.
They can make it illegal to buy and sell these stablecoins. The exchanges where the stablecoins are bought and sold would have to delist these coins or face criminal action.
Hmmm, I'm aware of some that aren't scams. MakerDAO and OlympusDAO aren't scams. They might fail utterly, but lots of things that aren't scams are just good faith failures.
This seems like an interesting use for crypto-style staking. Rather than simply paying Elsevier or Springer to publish, which is a transaction that increasingly makes no sense, instead take those fees and put them in an interest-generating escrow account. If the paper is retracted within some window of time (say, 3 years), the money goes to the group that found the problems. If not, it gets returned plus interest to the authors or their organization.
This would create an economic incentive to hunt scientific fraud, and possibly even replication studies, while also over time putting the money that's currently just being gouged by legacy publishers back into science.
Doubt is healthy and free but it doesn't get you anywhere.
If you evaluate the mechanism they explain, your prognosis will be better informed. Really the size of the molecule is neither here nor there. It's the therapeutic application that counts.
> SAK3 enhanced the proteasome activity via CaMKII activation
Consider why that might be effective.
It is explained clearly in their AD paper abstract.
The point of the above posts though is that Virgil Griffith is probably going to prison because he wasn't paying attention to sanctions though? Or, the case of Meng Wanzhou who is a Chinese citizen who avoided connecting flights through the US and was arrested in Canada anyway for violating trade sanctions with Iran?
Everything has a name, but it is generally a “systematic” name[1] rather than a one-off descriptive name. Even DNA is a systematic name for the monomer (de-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid is one of the defined nucleic acids bound to a ribose sugar missing an oxygen at the 2-position carbon).
Biology uses an enormous space of small molecule structures (to say nothing of proteins, which have their own naming schemes) and few have names you might recognize generally, but all have useful systematic names that biologists and chemists can quickly parse.
As a twist, most systematic naming schemes don’t produce unique labels, so there’s often multiple ways to say the same thing, and different discipline subcultures have different biases in this regard.
Edit: re-reading OP, another interpretation is that they’re asking what percent of molecules in the body aren’t involved in biology. The answer to that is probably something that approximates 0%. At the end of the day, the combined interaction of all of this chemistry is what biology is, and everything is more or less everywhere. (…concentration is everything.)
Not everything can nor does have a "name". First, there are kinds of molecules which we have not yet imagined yet, for which we do not yet have an IUPAC naming system. One could be devised, however that's an ongoing task.
Think of the endohedral fullerenes — metal atoms stuck inside of buckyball cages — those have really only been directly in chemists' sights for 30 or so years. [0]
Another pair of extrema are 2D materials and network solids, which are effectively massive molecules. Again, we don't have a great naming system for them, even if we could properly catalogue all of the bonds (and enclosed species). And more practically, one is probably better off with a set of atomic coordinates to describe them.
> what percent of molecules in the body aren’t involved in biology. The answer to that is probably something that approximates 0%.
I think the answer might be different (and more interesting) if constrained to human biology. What percentage of the variety of “stuff” in our bloodstream/tissues, that came in from our air/water/food and then maybe got metabolized a bit, is now of a form entirely inapplicable to anything going on — or that could even potentially go on — in a human body? How much is pure “waste to be excreted” from the human perspective, with both no use in keeping it around, but also no danger in keeping it around?
(I know that this is at least what allantoin is for the species that make it; but we’re not one of those.)
I presume a lot of toxins that get inactivated by the liver end up in such a form.
Depending on your definition of "no use in keeping it around." Apparently it's fairly useful as a moisturizer and as a skin protectant. You're still correct, of course, in the sense that it's not metabolically useful, but it's kind of amusing to me that it's got these other cosmetic effects that are in some sense useful.
