I have a theory, newly formed. And this seems the best place to share it, because this motley collection of minds generally knows their stuff and won't hesitate to tell me I'm wrong. :)
The only two meaningful categories of currency are "large" and "small". Large currency is cash, coins. It can be manipulated with the hand, verified by the eye. "Small currency" is expressed as microscopic state, and requires complex tools to observe, verify, etc. Both bitcoin and mintchip are microscopic currency. Computers function, then, first and foremost, as a kind of microscope.
My theory is that small currency is only as secure as the microscope used. And 'microscopes' expressed on computers are themselves expressed 'in the small', requiring other microscopes to verify, which can in turn be subverted. It's subvertable microscopes all the way down.
What is the solution then? You need a cheap, 'trusted' microscope/small wallet from a single source. It needs to be cheap so that it can be replaced frequently (lost or stolen). It needs to be from a single source because if trust is ever broken you need to get it from a different trusted source.
Also, it would be smart to limit the amount on a single device to being less than or equal to the cost of physically defeating the device.
Mind you, the MintChip "microscope" is incomplete: it requires a host system to do user interaction. Which, in my view, will always be the primary weakness of any small currency. All you need to do is write a dummy program to fool a user into believing they received the money, and you've won. And that's trivially easy.
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I have a theory, newly formed. And this seems the best place to share it, because this motley collection of minds generally knows their stuff and won't hesitate to tell me I'm wrong. :)
That would be correct.
>The only two meaningful categories of currency are "large" and "small". Large currency is cash, coins. It can be manipulated with the hand, verified by the eye. "Small currency" is expressed as microscopic state, and requires complex tools to observe, verify, etc. Both bitcoin and mintchip are microscopic currency. Computers function, then, first and foremost, as a kind of microscope.
What are you even saying? I saw where you were going and then you took a swerve left at the last second. How does storing state in a microscopic state turn a computer into a microscope? I assure you that no computer hardware works by looking at stored state with a lens and using computer vision algorithms to determine the state of the device.
>My theory is that small currency is only as secure as the microscope used. And 'microscopes' expressed on computers are themselves expressed 'in the small', requiring other microscopes to verify, which can in turn be subverted. It's subvertable microscopes all the way down.
A pet peeve of mine is calling such guesses "theories" at this point the proper term is "hypothesis". At any rate this is what cryptography is for. No amount of "subversion" is going to break checksums and hashes. (In a way that wouldn't set off serious red flags to users.) (Though turning them into a usable monetary system is left as an exercise for the reader.)
>What is the solution then? You need a cheap, 'trusted' microscope/small wallet from a single source. It needs to be cheap so that it can be replaced frequently (lost or stolen). It needs to be from a single source because if trust is ever broken you need to get it from a different trusted source.
It needs to not be from a single source you mean? If not then that sentence makes no sense. As it turns out; hardware bugs are actually harder to find than software ones. It would be better to use general hardware if only because you'd be less likely to find an intentional Trojan horse for bit-coin or similar in it.
>Also, it would be smart to limit the amount on a single device to being less than or equal to the cost of physically defeating the device.
So about the cost of a 5$ walmart screwdriver? A 50$ Blowtorch? It would end up being too low and you know it. It'd be better to just do an arbitrary limit like 500$ and call it done.
>Mind you, the MintChip "microscope" is incomplete: it requires a host system to do user interaction. Which, in my view, will always be the primary weakness of any small currency. All you need to do is write a dummy program to fool a user into believing they received the money, and you've won. And that's trivially easy.
Man in the middle attacks were something that certificates were supposed to solve; but didn't.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
>How does storing state in a microscopic state turn a computer into a microscope? I assure you that no computer hardware works by looking at stored state with a lens and using computer vision algorithms to determine the state of the device.
Oh sorry. It's a somewhat strange concept I admit, but it's served me well. There are a couple of ways to motivate it. Let us say that a computer has 4G of memory (roughly 10^10 bits). That is a vast amount of data. If that were to be printed out into a sheet of paper, with each bit a dot about what the naked human eye can see (call it .1 mm square) then it would be a sheet about 10 square meters (10^5 * 10^-4m = 10m^2).
The actual size of a 4G RAM chip is more like 1mm^2. This is a reduction factor of 10,000.
Let us say that a physical screen operates at the density of our original printout . This implies that the software sitting between the display and main memory is essentially functioning as a microscope, making visible to the naked eye a sheet of paper that is 10,000x smaller than we can see.
But if we consider information rather than data, the magnification is an order-of-magnitude higher, at least. (A screenful of characters 10px on each side requires 100bits, whereas the codepoint takes around 8bits.) And of course if we consider hard-drives rather than main memory, realize that a TB is roughly 1000x main memory, or 1000 sheets of paper, each 10 meters square (about 310 square meters).
>Oh sorry. It's a somewhat strange concept I admit, but it's served me well...(What follows is a brilliant analogy where I was expecting total insanity.)
You know. I think I'm going to use that in the future. Thanks.
The only two meaningful categories of currency are "large" and "small". Large currency is cash, coins. It can be manipulated with the hand, verified by the eye. "Small currency" is expressed as microscopic state, and requires complex tools to observe, verify, etc. Both bitcoin and mintchip are microscopic currency. Computers function, then, first and foremost, as a kind of microscope.
My theory is that small currency is only as secure as the microscope used. And 'microscopes' expressed on computers are themselves expressed 'in the small', requiring other microscopes to verify, which can in turn be subverted. It's subvertable microscopes all the way down.
What is the solution then? You need a cheap, 'trusted' microscope/small wallet from a single source. It needs to be cheap so that it can be replaced frequently (lost or stolen). It needs to be from a single source because if trust is ever broken you need to get it from a different trusted source.
Also, it would be smart to limit the amount on a single device to being less than or equal to the cost of physically defeating the device.
Mind you, the MintChip "microscope" is incomplete: it requires a host system to do user interaction. Which, in my view, will always be the primary weakness of any small currency. All you need to do is write a dummy program to fool a user into believing they received the money, and you've won. And that's trivially easy.