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Isn’t the real problem that there are crazy people out free?

Do AI ethicists believe we should be allowed to discuss height and weight, or are all attributes verboten?

Not sure. I am not even sure what qualifies someone as an AI ethicist. Meta's policy feels totally wrong though.

if “AI” says I am smarter than you (and hence better fit for a job both us of might be going after perhaps?) cause I am taller and fatter than you - perhaps :)

Nobody cares what agenda-driven academic organizations have to say about moral issues. People can make up their own minds about what is happening. These sorts of self-aggrandizing pronouncements are patronizing and counterproductive.

Yep. How can it be a genocide when the population of Gaza has been growing crazy fast? And why isn’t Israel’s response just self defense? This seems like subjective judgments by organizations outing themselves as irrelevant.

Telling people how they have to design their systems is the opposite of freedom.

I prefer to live in a society where adults are free to come to their own arrangements with other adults. Not one where those with a penchant for authoritarianism set terms for others.

Sometimes this system may have warts like not getting to watch Netflix on your Switch, but that seems like a small price to pay for respecting individual autonomy.


Perfect timing.

Imperfect timing

best published method

Are the bitcoins in the first wallets gone? No? I will assume it's still the best method without any irrefutable evidence.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA to sign transactions, not RSA.

In addition, selling information to a government on how to break either system would be more valuable than the amount of bitcoin you would able to sell before exchanges stop accepting deposits or the price crashes.


> In addition, selling information to a government on how to break either system would be more valuable

Honest question because one can find such claims very often on forums like HN:

Does there really exist a "feasible" way how some "lone hacker" could sell such information to some government and become insanely rich?

I know that people who apparently have some deep knowledge about how exploit markets work claimed on HN that "if you have to ask how/where to solve your exploit (i.e. you have the respective contacts), you are very likely not able to".

This latter observation seems a lot more plausible to me than the claim often found on HN that some "lone individual" would be able to monetize on it if he found a way how to break ECDSA or RSA by selling it to some government.


Yes. Start what's known as "a company".

If a government knows you have such information they’ll take it not buy it.

So your best bet would probably be to try to sell as many BTC as possible then give away the solution for free to your/a government.


> If a government knows you have such information they’ll take it not buy it.

They would probably kill you so you couldn't tell others.

If a government can break crypto, that's worth more than money. Especially if it can remain peerless and undetected.


A method to efficiently factor large numbers will also break the ECDSA.

No, ECDSA relies on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. Nothing to do with factoring, at least not in the classical sense.

On a quantum computer, my understanding is that Shor's algorithm could potentially target both problems, though.


Both systems are an example of a hidden Abelian subgroup problem. That is also why Shor's algorithm equally applies to both: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm#Shor's_al...

So a hypothetical classic algorithm that breaks the RSA is also highly likely to break the ECDSA.


Well, this discussion is about prime number factorisation, and bitcoins use elliptic curve...

True, we can never know what state actors know that we don't, and my cryptography professor at university taught us that NSA likely had 20 years of mathematical advance over the academic crypto community.

That being said, NFS is almost thirty years old so maybe the NSA doesn't have anything better still.


What? I thought quantum computing was going to be factoring billion digit prime numbers in 5 years?

Sounds like a you problem

it takes time. It took decades to go from mainframe to micro. It’s going to take a while for a model 3-4x ChatGPT 5 that you can run on your watch.

Why should your blog be protected? Information wants to be free.

It's amazing how this catchphrase has reversed meanings for some people. It was previously used against walled gardens and paywalls, but these corporate LLMs are the ultimate walled garden for information because in most cases you can't even find out who created the information in the first place.

"Information wants to be free! That's why I support hiding it behind a chatbot paywall that makes a few people billionaires"


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