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Bitcoin as a law enforcement/natsec honeypot: what is the evidence?

168 points by ianso 13y ago

josephagoss 13y ago
This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a Government agency created Bitcoin (Much like what Paul Graham suggested) The main point is the same one that PG brought up, that the transaction graph is very easy to follow and if the gatekeepers are compromised then most of transactions become transparent. A novel point they make is that some group (probably the creators of Bitcoin) control 25% of the money supply. I have not read the paper yet so cannot comment but I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined. (If he does control them at all) Of course if they do control 25% of all the circulated Bitcoins this would forever stunt its growth as that actor would always be far too powerful. Whilst I do not believe a Government created Bitcoin I welcome these articles that counter my own views. This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin implementations as soon as possible. Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx/sec limit.
- nwh 13y ago
  >Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis. By design as in, that's the only way the network could conceivably work. Each node must be able to verify that the chain is intact and valid, otherwise they would have to be trusting a third party. There's ways of obfuscating this anyway, which seem to work quite well in practise. > This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a Government agency created Bitcoin It's not really. If the US government were to create something like this, they wouldn't have risked releasing something as ridiculously buggy as the original Satoshi client. You're talking massive remote exploits, people able to make their own coins due to an integer overflow, just chaos in the code. It's truly miraculous that it even took off at all, and the developers are still trying to fix the issues that Satoshi unknowingly introduced. Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team. >I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined That's correct, though you can't even verifiably say that all the coins were minted by Satoshi. I doubt they'll ever move, given that Satoshi made it very clear that remaining part of the community is a bad idea. In their shoes, I would have been mining to a bit bucket, which I imagine is the case here. > This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin implementations as soon as possible. Coinjoin is well and good, but zerocoin is a no show at the moment. It's immature, creates massive signatures, and is completely untested. There's no way it would ever make it's way into the mainstream client in it's current state, and the developers know that too. > Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx/sec limit. I'd go close to calling that one a myth. There's really nothing stopping 7 transactions a second at the moment, in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees. There's also nothing to stop the block limit from just being increased, 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment.
  - josephagoss 13y ago
    > Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team. This is refreshing to hear, however the Government does not have a history of writing good code (excluding NASA) I still feel like the Government argument could be correct. > I'd go close to calling that one a myth Well the limit is based on size, and 7tx/sec assumes an average transaction I think. > in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees I remember reading Satoshi did not intend for limited blockchain space and envisioned 500GB blocks. > 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment. A hard fork will be required, this will not be an issue if no one complains.
    - nwh 13y ago
      > This is refreshing to hear, however the Government does not have a history of writing good code (excluding NASA) I still feel like the Government argument could be correct. My point was more that if it was set up to be a honeypot, they'd want to do quite a good job to ensure that it was picked up by a community. The Satoshi client was anything but, and in itself would have had quite a high risk at completely bombing out. Developers are still battling with some of the less sensible bits of the design. > Well the limit is based on size, and 7tx/sec assumes average transaction I think. More clients moving to compressed keys would help with that, but yes, I think that's where the 7tx/second number comes from. > envisioned 500GB blocks I still think everybody would struggle with that. It's not a small amount of data to move around. I don't think I could even write 500GB to a hard disk in under 10 minutes, let alone the 6 or so minutes between blocks at the moment. It'll be a long time until that's even possible on a network-wide scale, my current node is under heavy enough load responding to it's peers as it is.
    - dagw 13y ago
      the Government does not have a history of writing good code How much NSA code have you seen? SELinux is one of the few pieces available and seems reasonably competent.
      - krenoten 13y ago
        I can't say how this applies within the NSA, but (security) hackers tend to write better publicly released code than academic mathematicians, as the constraints imposed on them tend to encourage soundness of implementation over soundness of concept. I have no idea how applicable this trend is to NSA security engineers vs whoever inside the NSA might have been tasked with this. I just think it's possible that if this were an NSA project, that doesn't necessarily imply good code.
- ianso 13y ago
  I didn't know that PG suggested something similar, thanks for the pointer :-)
- mcphilip 13y ago
  >A novel point they make is that some group (probably the creators of Bitcoin) control 25% of the money supply. I have not read the paper yet so cannot comment but I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined. From Table 7 on page 11 of the linked paper: Entity ID | Accumulated Incoming BTC's | Number of Transactions A | 2,886,650 | 246,012 B | 2,206,170 | 477,526 //Mt. Gox Since there were 9 million in the address graph, I assume that the 25% remark refers to unidentified Entity A in this table. However, I did not see any claim in the paper that there was evidence that this unnamed entity was trying to hide this accumulation. Does anyone know why this claim was made in the article?
  - ianso 13y ago
    Yup, because I misread the paper :-/ I thought it also stated that entity A had done large amounts of churning, which it hasn't. I'll fix that, thankyou...
- feral 13y ago
  >The main point is the same one that PG brought up, that the transaction graph is very easy to follow and if the gatekeepers are compromised then most of transactions become transparent. I agree with that point, but where did PG say that? Its not in his post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  Plenty of people on the cryptography mailing list mined the first coins like Hal Finney who wrote he is leaving them for his kids which is why they havent moved. Satoshi buggered off the day Gavin announced he was presenting BTC to the CIA seems odd he wouldnt stick around and try to influence development if he was a gov agent. His opsec was perfect though, which could mean he was an NSA or GCHQ employee doing this as a secret side project for himself. Nobody has had better opsec than Satoshi not once did he talk about anything personal even in PMs to Gavin or leave indicators to analyze. Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up
  - celticninja 13y ago
    yeah, the one thing that makes me think this was the work of one person is the fact that a group, even a close knit group of NSA/CIA/GCHQ operatives could not produce, test and release something liek this without one of them making an error. I assume that satoshi thought through the production and release of this software well in advance of actually doing it, i.e. never suggesting it on a forum account, never testing or discussing it with anyone until he was soewhat ready to go. However his posting to the cypherpunks group does make me think he was at least a lurker on there before he signed in as satoshi, hence his decent OpSec.
    - dobbsbob 13y ago
      The gateway monitoring argument is also pretty feeble since how are they going to extract ID scans or other info from worldwide gateways or p2p sales. Sure bitcoin is risky if using a major exchange in a western country but good luck getting info on a trade from a Russian exchange, or IRC exchanger connected via Tor who lives in Vietnam
  - gwern 13y ago
    > Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up Really? Who was that, I don't recall ever hearing about a real textual analysis being done.
- fleitz 13y ago
  The entire worth of all bitcoins is just north of $50 billion. It wouldn't be very difficult for any soveriegn to gain control of 25% of that market. Whether government created bitcoins is a moot point, knowing the answer to this question doesn't mean anything. The question is whether bitcoins provide a superior environment for transacting business when compared to alternatives.
- blauwbilgorgel 13y ago
  If a government created Bitcoin wouldn't China be more likely than the US?
hwh 13y ago
I realise that "evidence" is a term with a broader meaning. However, for most of the points brought up, I fail to see how they support the hypothesis that Bitcoin stems from a natsec background. Things like group efforts and maintaining anonymous identities are not specific for that environment. The Hezbollah reference was irritating and I would that consider a very remote analogy, if at all. Point 6 holds valid for a lot of financial services that allow to transfer monetary value in a non-physical fashion. Nevertheless, all points are probably either interesting knowledge about Bitcoin or valid statements about it.
- ianso 13y ago
  Yar, I realise the Hezbollah thingy is only tangentally applicable, but I couldn't find a better example of a single mistake compromising an identity and thereby a network. I think that someone (maybe Cory Doctorow?) wrote a better, at-length post about how hard it is to stay anonymous but I couldn't find it, so I used this example instead. Point 6 is my main stepping-stone from 'organised and capable' to 'government'. FWIW governments have deliberately set up 'dodgy banks' as a way of attracting money launderers and then busting them, so I think it's valid.
  - hwh 13y ago
    I guess my perspective on this is blurred by me being German, or in a broader context, European. Our institutions are not really known for laying such "traps". I guess it's different in the world of the secret services (as opposed to traditional law enforcement). And well, yes, in the US there's the DEA, maybe the FBI, too, but I always thought that their ability to legally create "dodgy banks" or similar are kind of a Hollywood thing. In general, the US seems a lot more willing and capable to really invest capacities in fighting money laundery than any agency I can imagine here in the EU.
    - nwzpaperman 13y ago
      It's normal here because of the ubiquity of dollars. Germany has nothing to protect making the hunting of barter market participants just another government cost.
losethos 13y ago
I wrote all 130,000 lines of TempleOS from scratch over ten years myself. It is divinely inspired. God demanded things and directed it. Percival is my dear old bird. I wuv him. I am the best programmer on the planet -- that's why God chose me to make His temple. I took 5 assembly classes at ASU. CSC226 CSC326 CSE421 CSE422 and CSC523
rdl 13y ago
I don't believe it is a honeypot, just a fundamental limitation for a distributed protocol. This is why I think in the long run a true blinded-signature form of ecash is essential. Handle distribution by having millions+ of issuers, independent, and then meta-currencies and realtime exchanges, just like real life, not a single distributed currency. I also think trusted computing is an essential component to safely handling money which is fully anonymous, irrevocable, and for meaningful amounts, which is why I've been working on that kind of stuff for a while. Sadly we're still a few years off from practical currency-handling trusted computing, and probably a decade from practical general-purpose trusted computing, but once people can genuinely trust their devices to not be subverted, things will be vastly more awesome. Zerocoin remains an option, but it is complex (I like simple), and difficult to implement. I didn't even think it was possible until Matt Green et al published; blinded signatures, on the other hand, are awesome, but fairly straightforward.
viraptor 13y ago
> If one individual cryptographer had written Bitcoin, it would contain far more idiosyncracies than it does, not just in the cryptosystem design but also in the C++ code itself. Well, it's not that uncommon for a single person to write a very secure and minimal software that really works. Look at almost anything produced by DJB.
- ianso 13y ago
  That's true, but then it's equally true that DJBs software, while absolutely excellent, is definitely idiosyncratic. If DJB anonymously published code using the same style, e.g. the configuration language, refusal to use standard UNIX daemons, etc., anyone who read the code would know immediately that it was him.
- jawr 13y ago
  I came to comment on this, that entire paragraph seems to contradict itself: > Likewise Colin's own one-person-product, the highly secure backup facility Tarsnap has also had only one serious vulnerability to date. Here he is showing how a one-person-product can be extremely secure and although he does suggest it's an order of magnitude more complex I still think the logic doesn't hold up.
- oleganza 13y ago
  Bitcoin 0.1 was quite buggy and was fixed constantly with a help of many developers.
drcode 13y ago
The main counterargument to this is that the bitcoin technology is so unusually clever and its success such an incredible fluke anyway that you'd have to assume the government to have an almost god-like intelligence and foresight to pull this off.
- VMG 13y ago
  And also take a huge risk of damaging itself in the process while pretending that the author is motivated by libertarian motives. This is a conspiracy theory.
  - antocv 13y ago
    No, a conspiracy theory would be that this accusation is coming from a government-shill so as to deter further usage of BitCoin. What else can the g-men really do... now is a good time considering after SR and all.
this_user 13y ago
The article makes some good points, but I don't think goverment involvement is the single most likely explanation for the facts we are able to observe. In my opinion, it is equally likely that Bitcoin is simply an elaborate Ponzi-type scheme. Think about it. A group of people with probable backgrounds in mathematics, cryptography, software development and economy bands together and creatse a new kind of digital currency. They gain control of a large chunk of the total money supply in the beginning when it is easy to do so. Then they wait and hope for widespread adoption. Thanks to combination of the the hard limit on money supply and general mass psychology their currency hugely appreciates in value. They now have a large amount of money in their hands created from nothing but the work they put into creating BTC. All that is left is to cash out at some point. The latter is admittedly difficult to do without it being detected, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen at some point.
- oleganza 13y ago
  Ponzi scheme requires breaking trust in promises. Satoshi was not giving anyone promises or taking anyone's money. Everyone voluntarily evaluates safety of the protocol and decides to mine or buy bitcoins from others.
qnr 13y ago
I think this is just as unlikely as the idea that Facebook is a law enforcement honeypot to track terrorists' social graphs. Your arguments sound somewhat plausible now, but back in 2009 bitcoin was just a cypherpunk's toy and no one had any idea how big it was going to become. I would argue that a conventional internet currency (like egold or liberty reserve) would make a far better honeypot (easier to track, shutdown at any time, cybercriminals were used to currencies like that)
triplesec 13y ago
This is a brilliant troll that makes me reassess bitcoin. Exactly what good security is. Because "it can't be, right?" I don't buy it, but we're going to have to debunk this carefully!
tocomment 13y ago
I see coinjoin mentioned a couple of times in this thread. Would anyone be able to explain it in simple terms?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jedunnigan 13y ago
  Sure. It's basically a transaction-level mixer. When you are building a transaction, you can hand pick the inputs and outputs you want to use. There are no constraints or limits. CoinJoin effectively allows you to collude with multiple parties when generating a transaction (take multiple inputs {see:unspent outputs} from the different parties), such that it is difficult to follow the coins to their respective outputs. Gmaxwell says it better than I: >The signatures, one per input, inside a transaction are completely independent of each other. This means that it's possible for Bitcoin users to agree on a set of inputs to spend, and a set of outputs to pay to, and then to individually and separately sign a transaction and later merge their signatures. The transaction is not valid and won't be accepted by the network until all signatures are provided, and no one will sign a transaction which is not to their liking.[1] [1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0
  - tocomment 13y ago
    Interesting. So this is something that would be built into the client, and happen automatically I guess?
    - jedunnigan 13y ago
      Well there would need to be a server/host to manage all the signatures, but it could be built into a client. There is one implementation I know of so far: https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin I wouldn't recommend using it, not sure if it's complete or not.
w_t_payne 13y ago
I genuinely hope it IS a honeypot. I am attracted to BitCoin-as-a-currency by it's near-zero-transaction-cost property. I am attracted to the technology (for peer-to-peer trading), by it's potential to disrupt traditional asset classes. I am rather disinterested in the privacy/secrecy aspect of the technology. Indeed, I would quite like to see ALL financial transactions made public; as that would greatly assist the fight against corruption, and many many many forms of wrongdoing.
- VMG 13y ago
  Would you also like to install a camera in my bedroom?
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    > Would you also like to install a camera in my bedroom? Why bother, when you could just use the NSA one?
    - w_t_payne 13y ago
      Are you keeping up with your duties? Did you perform your ritual of self-criticism this morning? Remember, you have to chant your oath of loyalty and subservience to Gen^H^H^H Lord Alexander at least five times a day!
      - tedunangst 13y ago
        I think you mean, did you remember to post "this is what a police state looks like" on reddit five times a day? :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- waqf 13y ago
  Making every transaction public imposes a transaction cost in itself.
- 13y ago
devx 13y ago
> Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis Maybe it's time Zerocoin (by Matthew Green's students) got implemented into Bitcoin: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-mak...
peterwwillis 13y ago
It makes more sense once you realize things like Tor were created specifically for the USG intelligence community[1]. Bitcoin could, for example, be used to trade money between drug traffickers and the CIA, whilst allowing DEA to track the funds around the world. Fun! [1] http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy-theory-needed-tor-created-us-go http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy-the...
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  The Navy was originally interested in techniques for decentralized communication between ships in a fleet, in such a way that the flagship would be unidentifiable. There are lots of applications for such a network that different government organizations would be interested in; The Government isn't a monolithic entity.
slashdotaccount 13y ago
It was I, N Bourbaki, working with Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Grothendiek, and the sender of dreams, from our aecret Atlantis undersea fortress.
guard-of-terra 13y ago
There is nothing you don't know about Bitcoin - everything is public and open source. However, you may not know who uses Bitcoin and how. Whether Bitcoin is or is not a natsec honeypoint can not affect any of Bitcoin properties, therefore this question is meaningless.
nl 13y ago
Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band. Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap? There have been numerous vulnerabilities in the software implementation[1], and there has been (arguably) at least two bug in the algorithm[2][3]. I'd note that both the AWS & Tarsnap problems were implementation bugs, not algorithmic problems. That is a much better record than both the Bittorrent implementation and algorithmic record. That's impressive, but doesn't seem superhuman. Bittorrent (which was the work of one person AFAIK), for example has had no real algorithmic changes to the core protocol since it was released[4], and it is much more widely used than Bitcoin. (Yes, I know about trackerless .torrents, but that's more the discovery mechanism than the core transport algorithm). [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... [2] http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/ http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013 [4] http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html (note the change history are all clarifications)
- dvogel 13y ago
  DJB still claims that qmail is exploit-free[1] as well as djbdns[2] and I think those are both 1-man shows. [1] http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html [2] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html
- mrb 13y ago
  "Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?" I don't think so, and I personally disagree with this statement. As a developer, I find bitcoin 0.1.0's code easy to read and understand (I had requested a tarball of it about 2 years ago from one of the developers, as it was not in source control). And even the number of lines of code is not particularly impressive. Version 0.1.0 has only 13k lines of C++ code (excluding GUI code): 7 ./irc.h 71 ./headers.h 156 ./key.h 177 ./sha.h 182 ./market.h 201 ./base58.h 264 ./market.cpp 265 ./irc.cpp 373 ./util.cpp 399 ./util.h 420 ./db.h 498 ./bignum.h 554 ./sha.cpp 597 ./script.h 604 ./db.cpp 750 ./uint256.h 856 ./net.h 1020 ./net.cpp 1127 ./script.cpp 1151 ./serialize.h 1317 ./main.h 2660 ./main.cpp 13649 total Plus 6k lines of (boilerplate) GUI code: 417 ./ui.h 720 ./uibase.h 1806 ./uibase.cpp 3228 ./ui.cpp 6171 total For comparison, many HN readers who are talented developers would consider 5k LoC of C++ relatively easy to write in a span of 3-5 weeks, as a day job, for a small project that they have a precise idea how to implement. So 13k lines for a project that apparently spanned a few months of Satoshi's time is absolutely plausible. I believe Bitcoin was written by one man. Source: http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz
mcherm 13y ago
I'll point out why I don't find this a credible hypothesis. I imagine someone highly-placed in the NSA speaking to their superiors: "Yes, we have built this alternative form of money. It can be used almost-anonymously for the purchase of drugs or for online gambling, for the funding of terrorists and anything else that people want to hide from the government. It will allow users to skirt money-laundering laws and avoid payment of income and sales taxes. But because of our ubiquitous surveillance, we think we can (probably) track anyone using it... well, MOST people using it." "It is a completely innovative idea -- few in the world have even had idle speculation about the idea of a currency like this and no one is currently working on building such a thing. Yes, it will probably spur development of similar crypto-currencies." "So, Mr. Director, can we have permission to release this into the wild?" I cannot imagine someone in charge saying, "Yes: release it."
- junto 13y ago
  On the flip side, this would give the CIA a fantastic opportunity to launder their own drug money into black budgets. It also gives them a great way to fund "freedom fighters" in countries that they don't like. No flying bags of cash around anymore. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql-xUcQEZbVg?hl=en http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKM...
- joekrill 13y ago
  Most people would have said that most of the recent revelations about the NSA were not credible hypotheses. Yet here we are.
pteredactyl 13y ago
I agree on the basis it hasn't been shut down. Rather, in a way, encouraged through the media. Also, anyone ever meet this Silk Road person?
ferdo 13y ago
If Bitcoin was a natsec honeypot, the NSA/NIST-approved secp256r1 algo would have been used instead of secp256k1.
junto 13y ago
I've always found Satoshi's choice of email address interesting. Gmx.com didn't launch until 2008, the same year Satoshi published his Bitcoin paper. GMX is a German company and the @gmx.de email address is highly popular in here, especially since Gmail was late to the party (legal action over 'gmail'). Web.de and Yahoo are the two other big players. GMX uses geo-location to direct users to specific GMX TLDs. To use the .com you would need to use Tor or a VPN. Without using some kind of geo-anonymising tool, I am stuck with a GMX.de account. Why choose GMX.com? Did he/she read about GMX launching in the US as he was looking for a new email account provider specifically to be used for Bitcoin correspondence? Was he/she based in Germany, knew of GMX and in using Tor or a VPN from Germany exited in the US and got a GMX.com account? It doesn't mean anything in itself, but I always thought the choice of gmx.com was a curious one.
- gwern 13y ago
  I have been told by people who received emails from Satoshi that he was sending even his emails over Tor. Aren't most Tor exit nodes in the USA? That could explain why he got a gmx.com address rather than gmx.de
nullc 13y ago
Well, it's factually inaccurate from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin has had several end-of-the-world vulnerabilities found and corrected. e.g. OP_RETURN bug (let anyone spend anyone elses coin) Value overflow bug (let anyone produce billions of bitcoin) Block merkle tree hash practically vulnerable to second preimage attacks (allowed anyone to select and kill arbitrary blocks, and thus rewrite the consensus) Plus a mountain of smaller design bugs and more conventional software crashes issues. The overall design is highly idiosyncratic in many ways. Novel integer serializations, random byte endianess.
incompatible 13y ago
Well, we know that bitcoin was developed by someone, and that they've managed to keep their identity(s) secret. The smaller the group, the easier it is to keep secrets. It's likely that if the NSA was behind it, or knows who is, then that would have come out in the Snowden leaks.
polemic 13y ago
> "Bitcoin was apparently designed by good cryptographers and peer-reviewed before it was released" I think this understates the effect of outliers. If you consider the incredible ability of Srinivasa Ramanujan to, quite literally, dream up ground-breaking theorems, then it becomes a lot more plausable that a single dedicated, highly unusual individual could produce Bitcoin. The same argument applies to OpSec. 99.99% are lacking the means (technologically or, more importantly, mentally) to maintain perfect cover. But it's the 0.01% outlier we're interested in. Comparing to existing cases is, by definition, invalid.
stuaxo 13y ago
Having had a lot of trouble with Amazon APIs, stopped reading ... it's just a very apples - ... not even oranges comparison.

168 points by ianso 13y ago

This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a Government agency created Bitcoin (Much like what Paul Graham suggested) The main point is the same one that PG brought up, that the transaction graph is very easy to follow and if the gatekeepers are compromised then most of transactions become transparent. A novel point they make is that some group (probably the creators of Bitcoin) control 25% of the money supply. I have not read the paper yet so cannot comment but I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined. (If he does control them at all) Of course if they do control 25% of all the circulated Bitcoins this would forever stunt its growth as that actor would always be far too powerful. Whilst I do not believe a Government created Bitcoin I welcome these articles that counter my own views. This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin implementations as soon as possible. Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx/sec limit.

nwh 13y ago
>Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis. By design as in, that's the only way the network could conceivably work. Each node must be able to verify that the chain is intact and valid, otherwise they would have to be trusting a third party. There's ways of obfuscating this anyway, which seem to work quite well in practise. > This is a surprisingly good analysis that strengthens the argument that a Government agency created Bitcoin It's not really. If the US government were to create something like this, they wouldn't have risked releasing something as ridiculously buggy as the original Satoshi client. You're talking massive remote exploits, people able to make their own coins due to an integer overflow, just chaos in the code. It's truly miraculous that it even took off at all, and the developers are still trying to fix the issues that Satoshi unknowingly introduced. Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team. >I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined That's correct, though you can't even verifiably say that all the coins were minted by Satoshi. I doubt they'll ever move, given that Satoshi made it very clear that remaining part of the community is a bad idea. In their shoes, I would have been mining to a bit bucket, which I imagine is the case here. > This also re-emphasizes the work that needs to go into coinjoin or zerocoin implementations as soon as possible. Coinjoin is well and good, but zerocoin is a no show at the moment. It's immature, creates massive signatures, and is completely untested. There's no way it would ever make it's way into the mainstream client in it's current state, and the developers know that too. > Also we need to seriously fix the 7 tx/sec limit. I'd go close to calling that one a myth. There's really nothing stopping 7 transactions a second at the moment, in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees. There's also nothing to stop the block limit from just being increased, 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  > Bitcoin was not the work of a skilled team. This is refreshing to hear, however the Government does not have a history of writing good code (excluding NASA) I still feel like the Government argument could be correct. > I'd go close to calling that one a myth Well the limit is based on size, and 7tx/sec assumes an average transaction I think. > in fact it's intended to be tight for block space in order to create a market in which people battle for transaction fees I remember reading Satoshi did not intend for limited blockchain space and envisioned 500GB blocks. > 1MB is just arbitrary at the moment. A hard fork will be required, this will not be an issue if no one complains.
  - nwh 13y ago
    > This is refreshing to hear, however the Government does not have a history of writing good code (excluding NASA) I still feel like the Government argument could be correct. My point was more that if it was set up to be a honeypot, they'd want to do quite a good job to ensure that it was picked up by a community. The Satoshi client was anything but, and in itself would have had quite a high risk at completely bombing out. Developers are still battling with some of the less sensible bits of the design. > Well the limit is based on size, and 7tx/sec assumes average transaction I think. More clients moving to compressed keys would help with that, but yes, I think that's where the 7tx/second number comes from. > envisioned 500GB blocks I still think everybody would struggle with that. It's not a small amount of data to move around. I don't think I could even write 500GB to a hard disk in under 10 minutes, let alone the 6 or so minutes between blocks at the moment. It'll be a long time until that's even possible on a network-wide scale, my current node is under heavy enough load responding to it's peers as it is.
  - dagw 13y ago
    the Government does not have a history of writing good code How much NSA code have you seen? SELinux is one of the few pieces available and seems reasonably competent.
    - krenoten 13y ago
      I can't say how this applies within the NSA, but (security) hackers tend to write better publicly released code than academic mathematicians, as the constraints imposed on them tend to encourage soundness of implementation over soundness of concept. I have no idea how applicable this trend is to NSA security engineers vs whoever inside the NSA might have been tasked with this. I just think it's possible that if this were an NSA project, that doesn't necessarily imply good code.
ianso 13y ago
I didn't know that PG suggested something similar, thanks for the pointer :-)
mcphilip 13y ago
>A novel point they make is that some group (probably the creators of Bitcoin) control 25% of the money supply. I have not read the paper yet so cannot comment but I was under the impression 95% of Satoshi's coins have never moved since being mined. From Table 7 on page 11 of the linked paper: Entity ID | Accumulated Incoming BTC's | Number of Transactions A | 2,886,650 | 246,012 B | 2,206,170 | 477,526 //Mt. Gox Since there were 9 million in the address graph, I assume that the 25% remark refers to unidentified Entity A in this table. However, I did not see any claim in the paper that there was evidence that this unnamed entity was trying to hide this accumulation. Does anyone know why this claim was made in the article?
- ianso 13y ago
  Yup, because I misread the paper :-/ I thought it also stated that entity A had done large amounts of churning, which it hasn't. I'll fix that, thankyou...
feral 13y ago
>The main point is the same one that PG brought up, that the transaction graph is very easy to follow and if the gatekeepers are compromised then most of transactions become transparent. I agree with that point, but where did PG say that? Its not in his post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
dobbsbob 13y ago
Plenty of people on the cryptography mailing list mined the first coins like Hal Finney who wrote he is leaving them for his kids which is why they havent moved. Satoshi buggered off the day Gavin announced he was presenting BTC to the CIA seems odd he wouldnt stick around and try to influence development if he was a gov agent. His opsec was perfect though, which could mean he was an NSA or GCHQ employee doing this as a secret side project for himself. Nobody has had better opsec than Satoshi not once did he talk about anything personal even in PMs to Gavin or leave indicators to analyze. Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up
- celticninja 13y ago
  yeah, the one thing that makes me think this was the work of one person is the fact that a group, even a close knit group of NSA/CIA/GCHQ operatives could not produce, test and release something liek this without one of them making an error. I assume that satoshi thought through the production and release of this software well in advance of actually doing it, i.e. never suggesting it on a forum account, never testing or discussing it with anyone until he was soewhat ready to go. However his posting to the cypherpunks group does make me think he was at least a lurker on there before he signed in as satoshi, hence his decent OpSec.
  - dobbsbob 13y ago
    The gateway monitoring argument is also pretty feeble since how are they going to extract ID scans or other info from worldwide gateways or p2p sales. Sure bitcoin is risky if using a major exchange in a western country but good luck getting info on a trade from a Russian exchange, or IRC exchanger connected via Tor who lives in Vietnam
- gwern 13y ago
  > Somebody even scanned for every unique word Satoshi used to match it up to existing whitepapers and mailing lists, nothing turned up Really? Who was that, I don't recall ever hearing about a real textual analysis being done.
fleitz 13y ago
The entire worth of all bitcoins is just north of $50 billion. It wouldn't be very difficult for any soveriegn to gain control of 25% of that market. Whether government created bitcoins is a moot point, knowing the answer to this question doesn't mean anything. The question is whether bitcoins provide a superior environment for transacting business when compared to alternatives.
blauwbilgorgel 13y ago
If a government created Bitcoin wouldn't China be more likely than the US?

hwh 13y ago

I realise that "evidence" is a term with a broader meaning. However, for most of the points brought up, I fail to see how they support the hypothesis that Bitcoin stems from a natsec background. Things like group efforts and maintaining anonymous identities are not specific for that environment. The Hezbollah reference was irritating and I would that consider a very remote analogy, if at all. Point 6 holds valid for a lot of financial services that allow to transfer monetary value in a non-physical fashion. Nevertheless, all points are probably either interesting knowledge about Bitcoin or valid statements about it.

ianso 13y ago
Yar, I realise the Hezbollah thingy is only tangentally applicable, but I couldn't find a better example of a single mistake compromising an identity and thereby a network. I think that someone (maybe Cory Doctorow?) wrote a better, at-length post about how hard it is to stay anonymous but I couldn't find it, so I used this example instead. Point 6 is my main stepping-stone from 'organised and capable' to 'government'. FWIW governments have deliberately set up 'dodgy banks' as a way of attracting money launderers and then busting them, so I think it's valid.
- hwh 13y ago
  I guess my perspective on this is blurred by me being German, or in a broader context, European. Our institutions are not really known for laying such "traps". I guess it's different in the world of the secret services (as opposed to traditional law enforcement). And well, yes, in the US there's the DEA, maybe the FBI, too, but I always thought that their ability to legally create "dodgy banks" or similar are kind of a Hollywood thing. In general, the US seems a lot more willing and capable to really invest capacities in fighting money laundery than any agency I can imagine here in the EU.
  - nwzpaperman 13y ago
    It's normal here because of the ubiquity of dollars. Germany has nothing to protect making the hunting of barter market participants just another government cost.

losethos 13y ago

I wrote all 130,000 lines of TempleOS from scratch over ten years myself. It is divinely inspired. God demanded things and directed it. Percival is my dear old bird. I wuv him. I am the best programmer on the planet -- that's why God chose me to make His temple. I took 5 assembly classes at ASU. CSC226 CSC326 CSE421 CSE422 and CSC523

rdl 13y ago

I don't believe it is a honeypot, just a fundamental limitation for a distributed protocol. This is why I think in the long run a true blinded-signature form of ecash is essential. Handle distribution by having millions+ of issuers, independent, and then meta-currencies and realtime exchanges, just like real life, not a single distributed currency. I also think trusted computing is an essential component to safely handling money which is fully anonymous, irrevocable, and for meaningful amounts, which is why I've been working on that kind of stuff for a while. Sadly we're still a few years off from practical currency-handling trusted computing, and probably a decade from practical general-purpose trusted computing, but once people can genuinely trust their devices to not be subverted, things will be vastly more awesome. Zerocoin remains an option, but it is complex (I like simple), and difficult to implement. I didn't even think it was possible until Matt Green et al published; blinded signatures, on the other hand, are awesome, but fairly straightforward.

viraptor 13y ago

> If one individual cryptographer had written Bitcoin, it would contain far more idiosyncracies than it does, not just in the cryptosystem design but also in the C++ code itself. Well, it's not that uncommon for a single person to write a very secure and minimal software that really works. Look at almost anything produced by DJB.

ianso 13y ago
That's true, but then it's equally true that DJBs software, while absolutely excellent, is definitely idiosyncratic. If DJB anonymously published code using the same style, e.g. the configuration language, refusal to use standard UNIX daemons, etc., anyone who read the code would know immediately that it was him.
jawr 13y ago
I came to comment on this, that entire paragraph seems to contradict itself: > Likewise Colin's own one-person-product, the highly secure backup facility Tarsnap has also had only one serious vulnerability to date. Here he is showing how a one-person-product can be extremely secure and although he does suggest it's an order of magnitude more complex I still think the logic doesn't hold up.
oleganza 13y ago
Bitcoin 0.1 was quite buggy and was fixed constantly with a help of many developers.

drcode 13y ago

The main counterargument to this is that the bitcoin technology is so unusually clever and its success such an incredible fluke anyway that you'd have to assume the government to have an almost god-like intelligence and foresight to pull this off.

VMG 13y ago
And also take a huge risk of damaging itself in the process while pretending that the author is motivated by libertarian motives. This is a conspiracy theory.
- antocv 13y ago
  No, a conspiracy theory would be that this accusation is coming from a government-shill so as to deter further usage of BitCoin. What else can the g-men really do... now is a good time considering after SR and all.

this_user 13y ago

The article makes some good points, but I don't think goverment involvement is the single most likely explanation for the facts we are able to observe. In my opinion, it is equally likely that Bitcoin is simply an elaborate Ponzi-type scheme. Think about it. A group of people with probable backgrounds in mathematics, cryptography, software development and economy bands together and creatse a new kind of digital currency. They gain control of a large chunk of the total money supply in the beginning when it is easy to do so. Then they wait and hope for widespread adoption. Thanks to combination of the the hard limit on money supply and general mass psychology their currency hugely appreciates in value. They now have a large amount of money in their hands created from nothing but the work they put into creating BTC. All that is left is to cash out at some point. The latter is admittedly difficult to do without it being detected, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen at some point.

oleganza 13y ago
Ponzi scheme requires breaking trust in promises. Satoshi was not giving anyone promises or taking anyone's money. Everyone voluntarily evaluates safety of the protocol and decides to mine or buy bitcoins from others.

qnr 13y ago

I think this is just as unlikely as the idea that Facebook is a law enforcement honeypot to track terrorists' social graphs. Your arguments sound somewhat plausible now, but back in 2009 bitcoin was just a cypherpunk's toy and no one had any idea how big it was going to become. I would argue that a conventional internet currency (like egold or liberty reserve) would make a far better honeypot (easier to track, shutdown at any time, cybercriminals were used to currencies like that)

triplesec 13y ago

This is a brilliant troll that makes me reassess bitcoin. Exactly what good security is. Because "it can't be, right?" I don't buy it, but we're going to have to debunk this carefully!

tocomment 13y ago

I see coinjoin mentioned a couple of times in this thread. Would anyone be able to explain it in simple terms?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jedunnigan 13y ago
Sure. It's basically a transaction-level mixer. When you are building a transaction, you can hand pick the inputs and outputs you want to use. There are no constraints or limits. CoinJoin effectively allows you to collude with multiple parties when generating a transaction (take multiple inputs {see:unspent outputs} from the different parties), such that it is difficult to follow the coins to their respective outputs. Gmaxwell says it better than I: >The signatures, one per input, inside a transaction are completely independent of each other. This means that it's possible for Bitcoin users to agree on a set of inputs to spend, and a set of outputs to pay to, and then to individually and separately sign a transaction and later merge their signatures. The transaction is not valid and won't be accepted by the network until all signatures are provided, and no one will sign a transaction which is not to their liking.[1] [1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0
- tocomment 13y ago
  Interesting. So this is something that would be built into the client, and happen automatically I guess?
  - jedunnigan 13y ago
    Well there would need to be a server/host to manage all the signatures, but it could be built into a client. There is one implementation I know of so far: https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin https://github.com/calafou/coinjoin I wouldn't recommend using it, not sure if it's complete or not.

w_t_payne 13y ago

I genuinely hope it IS a honeypot. I am attracted to BitCoin-as-a-currency by it's near-zero-transaction-cost property. I am attracted to the technology (for peer-to-peer trading), by it's potential to disrupt traditional asset classes. I am rather disinterested in the privacy/secrecy aspect of the technology. Indeed, I would quite like to see ALL financial transactions made public; as that would greatly assist the fight against corruption, and many many many forms of wrongdoing.

VMG 13y ago
Would you also like to install a camera in my bedroom?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  > Would you also like to install a camera in my bedroom? Why bother, when you could just use the NSA one?
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Are you keeping up with your duties? Did you perform your ritual of self-criticism this morning? Remember, you have to chant your oath of loyalty and subservience to Gen^H^H^H Lord Alexander at least five times a day!
    - tedunangst 13y ago
      I think you mean, did you remember to post "this is what a police state looks like" on reddit five times a day? :)
deleted 13y ago
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waqf 13y ago
Making every transaction public imposes a transaction cost in itself.
13y ago

devx 13y ago

> Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis Maybe it's time Zerocoin (by Matthew Green's students) got implemented into Bitcoin: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-mak...

peterwwillis 13y ago

It makes more sense once you realize things like Tor were created specifically for the USG intelligence community[1]. Bitcoin could, for example, be used to trade money between drug traffickers and the CIA, whilst allowing DEA to track the funds around the world. Fun! [1] http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy-theory-needed-tor-created-us-go http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/no-conspiracy-the...

fiatmoney 13y ago
The Navy was originally interested in techniques for decentralized communication between ships in a fleet, in such a way that the flagship would be unidentifiable. There are lots of applications for such a network that different government organizations would be interested in; The Government isn't a monolithic entity.

slashdotaccount 13y ago

It was I, N Bourbaki, working with Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Grothendiek, and the sender of dreams, from our aecret Atlantis undersea fortress.

guard-of-terra 13y ago

There is nothing you don't know about Bitcoin - everything is public and open source. However, you may not know who uses Bitcoin and how. Whether Bitcoin is or is not a natsec honeypoint can not affect any of Bitcoin properties, therefore this question is meaningless.

nl 13y ago

Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band. Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap? There have been numerous vulnerabilities in the software implementation[1], and there has been (arguably) at least two bug in the algorithm[2][3]. I'd note that both the AWS & Tarsnap problems were implementation bugs, not algorithmic problems. That is a much better record than both the Bittorrent implementation and algorithmic record. That's impressive, but doesn't seem superhuman. Bittorrent (which was the work of one person AFAIK), for example has had no real algorithmic changes to the core protocol since it was released[4], and it is much more widely used than Bitcoin. (Yes, I know about trackerless .torrents, but that's more the discovery mechanism than the core transport algorithm). [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... [2] http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/ http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/25954806/, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.msg9503#msg9503 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#The_fork_of_March_2013 [4] http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html (note the change history are all clarifications)

dvogel 13y ago
DJB still claims that qmail is exploit-free[1] as well as djbdns[2] and I think those are both 1-man shows. [1] http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html [2] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html
mrb 13y ago
"Is there any actual analysis to support the claim that it is an order of magnitude more complex than AWS crypto or Tarsnap?" I don't think so, and I personally disagree with this statement. As a developer, I find bitcoin 0.1.0's code easy to read and understand (I had requested a tarball of it about 2 years ago from one of the developers, as it was not in source control). And even the number of lines of code is not particularly impressive. Version 0.1.0 has only 13k lines of C++ code (excluding GUI code): 7 ./irc.h 71 ./headers.h 156 ./key.h 177 ./sha.h 182 ./market.h 201 ./base58.h 264 ./market.cpp 265 ./irc.cpp 373 ./util.cpp 399 ./util.h 420 ./db.h 498 ./bignum.h 554 ./sha.cpp 597 ./script.h 604 ./db.cpp 750 ./uint256.h 856 ./net.h 1020 ./net.cpp 1127 ./script.cpp 1151 ./serialize.h 1317 ./main.h 2660 ./main.cpp 13649 total Plus 6k lines of (boilerplate) GUI code: 417 ./ui.h 720 ./uibase.h 1806 ./uibase.cpp 3228 ./ui.cpp 6171 total For comparison, many HN readers who are talented developers would consider 5k LoC of C++ relatively easy to write in a span of 3-5 weeks, as a day job, for a small project that they have a precise idea how to implement. So 13k lines for a project that apparently spanned a few months of Satoshi's time is absolutely plausible. I believe Bitcoin was written by one man. Source: http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz http://www.zorinaq.com/pub/bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz

mcherm 13y ago

I'll point out why I don't find this a credible hypothesis. I imagine someone highly-placed in the NSA speaking to their superiors: "Yes, we have built this alternative form of money. It can be used almost-anonymously for the purchase of drugs or for online gambling, for the funding of terrorists and anything else that people want to hide from the government. It will allow users to skirt money-laundering laws and avoid payment of income and sales taxes. But because of our ubiquitous surveillance, we think we can (probably) track anyone using it... well, MOST people using it." "It is a completely innovative idea -- few in the world have even had idle speculation about the idea of a currency like this and no one is currently working on building such a thing. Yes, it will probably spur development of similar crypto-currencies." "So, Mr. Director, can we have permission to release this into the wild?" I cannot imagine someone in charge saying, "Yes: release it."

junto 13y ago
On the flip side, this would give the CIA a fantastic opportunity to launder their own drug money into black budgets. It also gives them a great way to fund "freedom fighters" in countries that they don't like. No flying bags of cash around anymore. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql-xUcQEZbVg?hl=en http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKM...
joekrill 13y ago
Most people would have said that most of the recent revelations about the NSA were not credible hypotheses. Yet here we are.

pteredactyl 13y ago

I agree on the basis it hasn't been shut down. Rather, in a way, encouraged through the media. Also, anyone ever meet this Silk Road person?

ferdo 13y ago

If Bitcoin was a natsec honeypot, the NSA/NIST-approved secp256r1 algo would have been used instead of secp256k1.

junto 13y ago

I've always found Satoshi's choice of email address interesting. Gmx.com didn't launch until 2008, the same year Satoshi published his Bitcoin paper. GMX is a German company and the @gmx.de email address is highly popular in here, especially since Gmail was late to the party (legal action over 'gmail'). Web.de and Yahoo are the two other big players. GMX uses geo-location to direct users to specific GMX TLDs. To use the .com you would need to use Tor or a VPN. Without using some kind of geo-anonymising tool, I am stuck with a GMX.de account. Why choose GMX.com? Did he/she read about GMX launching in the US as he was looking for a new email account provider specifically to be used for Bitcoin correspondence? Was he/she based in Germany, knew of GMX and in using Tor or a VPN from Germany exited in the US and got a GMX.com account? It doesn't mean anything in itself, but I always thought the choice of gmx.com was a curious one.

gwern 13y ago
I have been told by people who received emails from Satoshi that he was sending even his emails over Tor. Aren't most Tor exit nodes in the USA? That could explain why he got a gmx.com address rather than gmx.de

nullc 13y ago

Well, it's factually inaccurate from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin has had several end-of-the-world vulnerabilities found and corrected. e.g. OP_RETURN bug (let anyone spend anyone elses coin) Value overflow bug (let anyone produce billions of bitcoin) Block merkle tree hash practically vulnerable to second preimage attacks (allowed anyone to select and kill arbitrary blocks, and thus rewrite the consensus) Plus a mountain of smaller design bugs and more conventional software crashes issues. The overall design is highly idiosyncratic in many ways. Novel integer serializations, random byte endianess.

incompatible 13y ago

Well, we know that bitcoin was developed by someone, and that they've managed to keep their identity(s) secret. The smaller the group, the easier it is to keep secrets. It's likely that if the NSA was behind it, or knows who is, then that would have come out in the Snowden leaks.

polemic 13y ago

> "Bitcoin was apparently designed by good cryptographers and peer-reviewed before it was released" I think this understates the effect of outliers. If you consider the incredible ability of Srinivasa Ramanujan to, quite literally, dream up ground-breaking theorems, then it becomes a lot more plausable that a single dedicated, highly unusual individual could produce Bitcoin. The same argument applies to OpSec. 99.99% are lacking the means (technologically or, more importantly, mentally) to maintain perfect cover. But it's the 0.01% outlier we're interested in. Comparing to existing cases is, by definition, invalid.

stuaxo 13y ago

Having had a lot of trouble with Amazon APIs, stopped reading ... it's just a very apples - ... not even oranges comparison.