dodobirdlord

Laws tend to be written pretty broadly, with the understanding that when you encounter a law that seems like it could be construed in a ridiculous way, it’s the ridiculous construal that is silly and not the law. Judges and juries exist to ensure that silly stuff doesn’t happen, rather than trying to write laws so that they hold up to the most adversarial possible reading.

Is writing a book about being a bank robber going to pass muster as a threat to public morals? Probably no. Is setting up a free cigarette dispenser outside of an elementary school? Probably yes.

Places like Apple run their supply chains to ground. Literally in some cases, as they track sourcing of component materials back to the mines they are dug out of.

The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.

Panicking is fairly important for ergonomics and safety. If panicking wasn’t available and execution had to proceed in all situations, recovering from a situation like memory corruption where invariants have been violated would require a lot of error handling anywhere an invariant is checked. This is exactly the sort of large amounts of error handling for situations that will almost certainly never arise than you are concerned about.

This was more or less true until everyone and their dog started running agents in a 24/7 busyloop as a bit.

The signature scheme used by bitcoin is far from the best encryption we have today, and more resistant to being updated than most more important things. So it’s an interesting novelty.

If you don’t also drop wallets with compromised signatures at some point after introducing secure signatures (effectively editing the ledger) they will be up for grabs.

Absent a functional ledger rewrite I expect there would be some window where miners with access to CRQCs switch their focus over to exclusively mining blocks of transactions transferring coins from insecure wallets to secure wallets under their own control. Is there actually interest in living in the world where the first person with both a CRQC and a mining farm gets to claim all of the stranded bitcoins for themselves?

Doesn’t this effectively still destroy all legacy wallets? Once the throttling limit goes into effect, it will be impossible for holders of legacy wallets to transfer their bitcoin without paying ~1 bitcoin per bitcoin they want to move. Doesn’t this amount to the same thing as abolishing all legacy wallets plus increasing the mining reward with extra steps?

In the absolute disaster scenario where the ecosystem is taken by surprise by an adversary with a CRQC, regulated custodians could form a consortium to reconstitute a new quantum-resistant version of bitcoin, pooling their ownership ledgers from before the disaster to reinitialize the blockchain and consigning to oblivion all coins not held in custody.

Does anyone happen to know if it is settled law in the United States that transferring bitcoins using a cracked key is a criminal act? It’s not immediately obvious to me that it would be covered by the CFAA.

What risk are you envisioning in #1?

Prosecutors don't have to "prove" things, they have to convince a jury. If your defense seems implausible a jury probably won't buy it.

Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.

I suppose they could also put the points on the car and impound it after it accrues enough points to have a drivers license suspended. Hard to drive if you don’t have a car.

Assuming we’re talking about RFC 2119, it’s important not to collapse the distinction between SHOULD and MAY, which is there for a reason. MAY elements are legitimately optional, SHOULD elements are there for a reason and are disregarded at one’s own risk.

> SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

To validly disregard a SHOULD, you need to (a) fully understand the implications, and (b) accept them.

Any time someone disregards a SHOULD and then complains about the result, they are necessarily in the wrong. Either they didn’t fully understand the implications, or they don’t actually accept them.