Bitcoin and Neptune's Brood

February 12, 2015 at 1:09 PM

Now I understand more about /Neptune's Brood/, by Charles Stross.  Especially the thread about virtual currency that runs through it. 





Bitcoin's central technology, the innovation that makes the whole thing work, is the blockchain.  Your "wallet", in which you store your Bitcoin, is not a file on your computer, or any specific computer anywhere, but rather a domain in the blockchain, which is stored in a cloud of computers and kept current through peer-to-peer file sharing.  Stored within the blockchain is a ledger of every Bitcoin ever mined, every wallet ever made, and every transaction since the Genesis.  Each wallet is an encrypted digital record stored in the blockchain which has two keys, a public key which everyone can see, and a private key which is held only by the wallet's owner and is necessary to conduct transactions on that specific wallet.  Everyone with the right software can look at a wallet and see what's in it, but only the owner of the private key can conduct transactions on that wallet.  If that private key is lost then the wealth contained in that wallet is lost with it. 





Now consider such a wallet with an amount of wealth in it equivalent to the gross domestic product of the United States.  67 Trillion 2013 Dollars.  Wealth beyond the wildest, wettest dreams of avarice.  Everyone can see the wallet way down in the beginning of the blockchain.  The public key is well known.  The origins of that wallet are lost to the mists of time, and have faded into legend.  People have tried for generations to recover the lost private key, and failed.  The key is thought to be on a computer chip lost in the deepest of the deep ocean. 





Now consider that you think you may have found the location of that lost computer chip, and you have a chance to recover it for yourself.  Would you risk your life for it? 





Would you kill for it? 





Would you go to war for it? 





This is why I strongly recommend reading /Neptune's Brood/, by Charles Stross.  It is very, very good stuff.  This is why it was a _close_ runner-up for last year's Hugo Award. 


Comments

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  Jay Ashworth Aha. So what we're saying is, the usability of the system depends on it being impossible to reverse engineer the PKI. That could be rough.
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  Alan Petrillo Not necessarily impossible, but prohibitively difficult. And that enterprising hacker would have to repeat the process for _each_ PKI he wanted to recover. Another potential exploit is generating a "hard fork" in the blockchain, but that would require the ability to take over more than half of the hashing power of all the miners working on it, which at this point would require an investment of around a Billion dollars in mining equipment, and that investment will only get larger as more miners come on line.
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  Jo Van Ekeren I know... when I read that book, partway through I found myself saying "Woah... this is some seriously heavy shit masquerading as a SFF novel".
  
  Of course, this happens EVERY time I read a novel by Charles Stross. Or by Cory Doctorow.