Inevitably, here comes the test case:
A U.S. federal judge has ordered a defendent to decrypt her laptop.
–Schneier on Security: Federal Judge Orders Defendant to Decrypt Laptop
Nice profile of Christopher Soghoian in WIRED, entitled “The Pest Who Shames Companies Into Fixing Security Flaws”.
I’ve run into Chris at a few conferences, and read a good bit of his stuff, and I think he’s every bit as good as this profile makes him sound.
It seems the bad guys who infect Macs think it’s worth the trouble to plant Trojans to mine Bitcoins. They’re pretty smart, so I guess this counts as one vote of confidence.
(Thanks to WG for the tip, although probably she won’t approve of the spin.)
It doesn’t look real pretty. See Forbes, The End of Bitcoin Part II. (Although, having a ‘part II’ to your ending suggests you are not going totally quietly.)
I was pretty negative about Bitcoin right from the start, and I make no apologies for that.
Philip Maymin, Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP.
I prove that if markets are efficient, meaning current prices fully reflect all information available in past prices, then P = NP, meaning every computational problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. I also prove the converse by showing how we can “program” the market to solve NP-complete problems. Since P probably does not equal NP, markets are probably not efficient. Specifically, markets become increasingly inefficient as the time series lengthens or becomes more frequent. An illustration by way of partitioning the excess returns to momentum strategies based on data availability confirms this prediction.
But if P = NP then that’s it for most of modern cryptography, especially public/private key encryption. We’ll have to send giant one-time pads to each other before we can have secure communications.
So it turns out (if this paper is correct) that the choice is not (national) security or privacy. It’s market efficiency or (data) security and privacy.
Then again, it’s hardly news that markets fail. Look outside your window.
Bitcoin is not securely anonymous. The publication of all spends creates a data pool that allows a motivated monitor to infer money flow facts about some users, and given the small number of key intermediaries would allow them to infer even more.
This is a straight-forward passive analysis of public data that allows us to de-anonymize considerable portions of the Bitcoin network. We can use tools from network analysis to visualize egocentric networks and to follow the flow of Bitcoins. This can help us identify several centralized services that may have even more details about interesting users. We can also apply techniques such as community finding, block modeling, network flow algorithms, etc. to better understand the network.
An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System: Bitcoin is not Anonymous. Spotted via Slashdot, Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous.
Jotwell
