> The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it.
Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
Bitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.
It's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit: Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now, increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it were possible.
That's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0.
Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).
Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
User bitcoinistrash is the one that brought it up, and they're spreading incorrect information about how it works.
Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any one specific input/hash pair.
In which context would somebody try to reverse a hash? That would be like arbitrarily enhancing a bad-resolution image to see something that cannot be seen.
Hash collision should always be about finding matching content for a hash.
And if you cracked the math of sha256 you wouldnt need to search you would just calculate one of the inputs to produce whatever you want. All zeros would be as easy as one.
> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet
Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.
I agree with you. The early web was full of amazing opportunities but had trouble monetizing things. Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize everything but doesn't have practical uses.
Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.
> looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.
Steam and pretty much every other regular retailer dropped Bitcoin support five years ago. The state of Bitcoin feels even more hopeless today than it did back then. It is impressive how you can run a trillion dollar pyramid scheme on just digital nothingness, but I always hoped for cryptocurrency to eventually turn into a real digital cash. Bypassing the fees and incompatibles between regular payment schemes. But none of that has happened. Bitcoin is still slow and expensive and there is hardly anything you can buy with it anyway. Worse yet, most Bitcoin still gets stored in "banks" instead of being self hosted, so it failed on the whole P2P cash thing as well.
It's impressive tech, but for all the wrong reasons.
It's still taking time I think. We understood that L1 should never have been the place for the end consumers and that's why all the chains (Bitcoin-Lightning; ETH various systems like StarkNet, zkSync, Loopring and so on) are currently in the process of finding out how to make everything that is happening on L1 possible on L2. On Ethereum one big part left out is still the the general ability to run EVM code on L2, but that is happening like right now.
Biggest problem after that will be user experience, but I am currently in the Ledger Connect (now Ledger extension) Testflight beta and it makes using dApps on iOS with a hardware wallet a really good experience. No cables, no app switching, no weird abstraction barrier. The new Stax also seems like a well thought out wallet that was created with a focus on UX. Only thing I don't yet see is a good NFC integration for existing payment terminals.
I still think the industry is really early. Layer 3 is now a topic for privacy preserving user interactions which is super interesting. It doesn't then stop at being your own bank, but with it you will be able to really control your own identity without anyone standing in the way. For needing less trust sharing your data and being self sovereign. Using the chains just as a highly accessible, authorized data store.
I like cryptocurrency overall, but the bar for convenient purchases is really high. For anyone to care, it'd better be as easy as tapping my credit card on the terminal... which even Apple Pay isn't.
See ... Back then we thought that it would be replacing cash. Some friends and I were thinking about having wallets in smart cards (technically possible) and distributing BTC terminals to local businesses.
The whole crazy investment thing came much later and basically destroyed any hope of using BTC on a daily basis.
If you bought $10 USD of it "at the time", you'd have a giant pile of USD. Who is stupid in that lack of purchase?
Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.
You're right that it's not meant for SHTF. It's for holding value under normal circumstances instead of passively investing in whatever other bubbles (stocks etc).
Btw, not very many people are putting their money into gold and silver. Returns on that have been lackluster for decades. If BTC truly became "digital gold," I wouldn't be very interested.
Once the original Bitcoin OG cypherpunks shifted from “here is an amazing new technology that could do entirely new things” to tweeting about the USD price of Bitcoin, I knew that era was over. I think it was done by ~2015.
The Ethereum research community is still doing very neat cutting-edge things, but they’re a younger generation and didn’t claim to believe in the same principles (only to later disappoint us all.)
The 'old internet' was chuck full of hucksters and scammers and 'futurists' selling snake oil, at least from circa 1993 onward and in full bloom since around the time of the Netscape IPO. It was pretty much exactly like the crypto industry, a core of real technologists doing amazing stuff, and then a whole industry of scammy sales people on top of it.
If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took off.
Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.