I also think so. The weakness of current popular cryptocurrencies though, is the complexity and size of their codebases. Many above 100k lines of code. That's risky. Though the benefit is that they are somewhat heterogeneous (different nodes running slightly different code/versions) so it may be hard to find a vulnerability which affects more than 50% of nodes; and this is a hard requirement for compromising the integrity of that system.
Traditional finance has the benefit that they can more easily reverse malicious transactions, but if hacks become too common, it will be impossible to correct fast enough and in a reliable way. With traditional banking, a hacker only needs to hack a few nodes to compromise the integrity of the entire system.
So yeah I also think crypto will win in the long run. I would bet on a tokenized stock with AI attached.
I think the top asset will combine the AI which is best at hacking with the blockchain which is hardest to hack.
Ability to corrupt others whilst maintaining perfect integrity yourself.
And people keep coming back. Myself included; there's no similar GPU products from AMD, Apple or Intel.
Nvidia won because their architecture is better. If you do a significant amount of work that can be CUDA-accelerated, you're kinda wasting your time not owning a CUDA-capable card. It's like being a video editor that software-encodes their projects because they don't want to get an accelerator card. It's your choice, but software-acceleration is a nightmare compared to how quick and efficient hardware-acceleration is. Competitors will all use the accelerator card and ship faster than you can.
Apple, AMD and Intel have all earned their current position by abandoning Khronos and refusing to build their own GPGPU architecture. If the entire industry refuses to invest in complex technology just because it's expensive, then they don't deserve to make money.
they could make money that way right now but they figured out they can make even more money by doing this. but jokes on them, people will figure it out, unlock / jailbreak and they just lose good will long term
No, the apple ecosystem will always hold a monopoly over stupid upper class people to fleece. Apple will say "jump" and Developers will ask how high (if they know what's good for their wallet)
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out with their "no unapproved code" stance. The old excuse was that normal users don't know how to write code and so don't need to be able to run their own code.
But now normal users can have some AI thing write single-use code for them, and for relatively simple code like "show me all my pictures between these two dates that are in landscape rather than portrait" they'll usually get it right.
And now who wants a phone where you can't do anything like that?
You absolutely can. You just have to pay Apple their $99/yr for the privilege. I have an app I vibecoded running on my phone to do regexps against a phone copy of /usr/share/dict/words because I find the regexp practice to be more fun when faced with a word game compared to getting stumped. There's some restrictions, like no running your own JIT on user specified JavaScript, aka no making a web browser, but for most apps I dare say you won't run into the limitations trying to scratch an itch.
They could be crowdfunded. You could even have a system where only contributors to the crowdfund have a license to use it.
>How is open source going to work when governments start declaring models as munitions?
I mean open source cryptography did win that battle in the end. Even if it's illegal you could host the model weights on i2psnark and crowdfund with monero.
Someone should survey our lands to find naturally-occuring billionaires to exploit. Billionaires are the next oil- green oil if you will! They practicially grow on trees.
On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least. Andrew Wang stated as much in a cnbc interview a few months ago.
If humans lost economic leverage (no jobs) but kept military leverage (usefulness as soldiers), that'd probably be utopia. We could all be a leisure class like the aristocrats of the past, and could defend that state of affairs.
Unfortunately we aren't in that world. AI+robots will deprive humans of both economic and military leverage. Most likely, powerful "blobs" of a few owner humans + a lot of automation will inherit the Earth and kick most humans to the curb.
>On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least.
What everyone knows is that American gun owners voted in the system that's eating them alive and that they don't care as long as that system doesn't touch their guns.
So they can just keep shooting watermelons in their backyards and being keyboard warriors on the internet, for as much as their "leverage" matters.
If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto. It is simply cryptocurrency that has been reallocated from an exchange to a more competent party, as the free market intended.
I don't think the security trade-off for most people is clear here.
Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.
I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.
Self custody doesn't require using a hardware ledger, and such gadgets represent a very small minority of self-custody wallets. In addition, there are noteworthy non-security risks when using an exchange. There's fraud, illiquidity, new legislation, asset forfeiture, and innumerable other reasons why an exchange might prevent you from withdrawing your funds. I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.
> Self custody doesn't require using a hardware ledger
Does this mean you recommend not using one? Because that goes against all the common best practice recommendations from when I did a couple of years working in Web3 stuff a few years back.
> I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.
That's not what I suggested.
I suggested that it is less secure over time than centralized exchanges, even with the things you listed.
>I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons
I interpreted this to mean you don't think there are practical reasons to use self-custody, which is why I shared multiple practical reasons to use it over an exchange. Security risk is only a portion of the risk you are exposed to by using an exchange. If you are only concerned with security risks, then maybe exchanges are preferable.
As for hardware ledgers, I'm not convinced that buying special-purpose hardware is preferable to using general-purpose hardware + software for this. I don't keep all my money in crypto though, so maybe I'm just uninformed.
By the nature of blockchain, it's never, ever your crypto. It's allocated to whichever bucket the majority of participants in a given network agree to allocate it to.
Well, not exactly. A malicious majority of miners could rewind the chain as they please. They could indirectly steal some funds by undoing certain transfers, but they couldn’t just directly reassign funds to themselves.
Absolutely not, as GPUs used in data centers cannot compete with ASICs designed specifically for Bitcoin mining.
The Bitcoin mining network is somewhere around 1000 EH/s, while the (AI assisted research ahead) 34.5 million H100-equivalent GPUs globally would yield about 0.435 EH/s. They'd represent less than 0.05% of the Bitcoin network.
Back around 2012 I created a paper wallet using an offline website (it was HTML and JS downloaded locally that worked without internet. I put it on a USB stick and then use it in a laptop without internet), printed it out and put it in a safe
I did a similar stunt with an old PowerBook where I electrically disabled the WiFi/Bluetooth so it wouldn’t be online unless I plugged in Ethernet, generated keys, and played around with mining. This was back in 2010 when this was all just basically toys for fun. I also encrypted it all with FileVault.
Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.
Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…
Okay maybe in 2010 you could use a CPU but even by 2012 it was entirely dominated by GPUs and I think even dedicated hardware was coming out around that time or soon after
> Coldcard’s software is built on MicroPython, and Coinkite supplies its own hardware-RNG wrapper for the device’s STM32 chip. To avoid conflicts, Coinkite deliberately disabled MicroPython’s built-in RNG path by setting a configuration flag, MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG, to zero. The problem: the underlying library checked only whether that flag was defined, not whether it was enabled (set to a non-zero value). Because a flag set to zero is still “defined,” the build silently compiled against the wrong code, and seed generation fell back to a deterministic software pseudo-random number generator called Yasmarang
bitaddresses .org? If the JS code was defective, the coins can still be stolen later if the hacker can recreate the keys by going through the small key space, despite the coins being created being offline.
idk the whole point of hardware wallets is that they are supposed to be a simpler stack. But if you're using a closed source hardware wallet...
An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code
But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually
How do you actually use funds like this? I mean, I know this is set aside for later. But if you had an emergency, how fast could you actually spend it?
Trivially. You can simply read the keys on the offline machine with your eyeballs and set up a software or hardware wallet elsewhere to access the account.
I wonder if wallet is not a good or bad analogy considering it would make sense to have many wallets to distribute potential damage instead of being taken out in a single hit... UX issue?
Or if it is your key and your air-gapped hardware wallet gets hacked because someone didn't use the right RNG. Crypto is apparently never yours; you're just holding on to it for some future criminal or nation state.
hardware waller is NOT your key too. YOUR key is the paper wallet generated OFFLINE on a clean laptop that was never connected to web. There is a giant difference.
Controlling your own crypto keys is like having your net worth in cash or gold stored in your house. It could easily be lost or stolen or destroyed in a fire unless you take extraordinary precautions and then it is all gone.
It's not at all like storing gold, since you can have multisig wallets. You can make it arbitrarily difficult to lose or get stolen, depending on how thinly you want to slice your secrets and how many friends you have.
It's not an enormous error prone hassle there are third parties that make it pretty intuitive. Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean it is impossible.
Can you really imagine the average person ever doing this? Or even understanding how multisig actually works? When you need to start engraving wallet addresses in titanium you have to step back and ask about usability.
Not to say that they're unhackable or unstealable, but merely that they dont have a central weak point that if broken, destroys the whole system
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