Reposted because it did not take off last time it was posted. Since the author recently passed and I thought it would be nice to give it a second chance. While it's still available.
To the decorative text behind the kitty, I would add that it's almost always helpful to include some form of praise and redirect, for example, "The current approach of doing X has worked well, but aspect Y could be improved by doing Z."
I feel I might not have the same conception of "front page" as you.
The way I see it, there should be room for small neat articles, even if they are not announcements of billion dollar projects. I know HN has changed over the years, and it probably used to have more of this stuff. But I don't think there is anything explicitly forbidding it. If users like it, it gets to the front page, maybe just for a couple of hours on a slow Sunday.
So in summary, I don't think anybody should stop posting things because they are "not front page stuff". Does this line or argumentation make sense to you or do you think I am missing something?
You are correct. I wasn't advocating that it not be posted, and I can see how my post made that seem what I meant.
I just didn't think that it was something that I would be that interested in, but I really enjoy many of the oddball, eclectic articles posted here, so my statement really isn't one that I feel should carry weight.
I did think it was a pretty "light on detail" post, though. I read stuff like that, all the time, and most of what I read, is a lot more "meaty," so it's really just a personal thing, for Yours Truly.
Seems like Mexicans are not punished for taking off the muffler or generally just using 'unsafe' vehicles.
When I visit Juarez, I'm always surprised to see all of the used school buses that are no longer considered road-worthy in America that area used for all kinds of things. Very often they leave the names of the American schools on the side.
There is no encryption in Bitcoin. It uses asymmetric cryptography for signatures, and it uses hashing. Encryption might be used by wallets, but that is not part of the consensus layer and therefore not part of Bitcoin.
No. Encryption is just one type of cryptography, used to make data unreadable without the secret key. Signatures are something else, used to prove that the holder of a secret signed the public data. Zero knowledge proofs are another, used to prove you know a secret without revealing it. It's a fascinating subject.
I'm not saying all cryptography is encryption, I'm not even really talking about signatures, I'm specifically talking about asymmetric cryptography. I don't see any example of "asymmetric cryptography" which is not just a usage of public-private key encryption.
If you're talking specifically about RSA, then it's true that encryption and signatures both use the same type of asymmetric math, but in opposite directions. But most asymmetric cryptography doesn't have this property.
But the signature is an encrypted hash value, which is decrypted when verifying the signature. Maybe you could say signature verification as a concept is not encryption, but certainly Bitcoin's implementation uses encryption, and I don't think there's any definition of 'asymmetric cryptography' that is not also some form of encryption.
I'm not an expert on BTC, but I'd guess that if you can derive the private key of a signature from its public key (which is what the paper is describing), you can use that to place transactions from said wallet on the blockchain (ie. spend that wallet's money), right? Genuinely curious if I understand this correctly, there's a lot I don't know about how bitcoin's protocol works.
No I don't think the paper is talking about breaking hashing here, they're talking about breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network.
Hashing isn't really the same thing... you're not "encrypting" data when you hash it, you're putting it through a one-way function that produces a consistent fixed-size output, such that if you provide the same input again, you get the same output.
Hashes aren't "reversible" in any reasonable sense of the word. Sure, you can keep guessing inputs until you produce one that has the same hash, but it's misleading to say that you're "decrypting" it. I'd instead say you're finding collisions.
To me, "decryption" implies that there's some secret you have which can take the hash and turn it back into its original input in constant or linear time. Using the word "decryption" to describe "finding a hash collision" isn't really correct.
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