What I really look forward with BECs (although simple atomic interferometers based on ultracold atoms would do, too) is super-sensitive magnetic field detection.
One can detect magnetic fields from a shielded laptop, even many meters away, and figure out what's happening inside (e.g. leaking secrets etc).
I think, not a terribly difficult experiment, but nobody has performed it: need ultracool physicists and hackers in one lab room
Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week.
Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion.
There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.
Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is a different story.
Well, this doesn't look right to me. Imagine that the moon is actually a filter at the path of the sunlight.
Sun's temperature is 6000 K. Moon's surface is pretty black: it reflects only 12% of the light.
So, effective temperature of the Sun reflected by Moon, considering that thermal radiation is proportional to T^4, is 6000 * .12 ^ (1/4) ~= 3500 K. That's quite enough to light up some fire! Of course, the spectral composition of the light will be not thermal etc, but the estimate should be close enough.
Why doesn't the Moon itself heat up like that? Well, the rocks on Earth don't heat up to 6000 K either... I think, it's partly that they are "not surrounded by sun", partly that the Moon is a giant cold heatsink
What's even more surprising is the position of Coinbase:
"Given how useful it is for criminals to have financial accounts that are
seemingly unconnected to them, I view this feature of the legislation as an important next step
in the fight against global money laundering."
Although slower, it feels like TFHE would provide better security against an active adversary. So, at least, simple server-side encrypted queries would well be possible
a) smart contracts controlling something within the encrypted data based on publicly available data;
b) encrypted key-value store where you traverse the tree structure based on encrypted query and encrypted tree buckets, but get a publicly available result about which bucket is next (similarly to how it was done in Arx paper using garbled circuits).
That's a seriously cool thing to have in the toolbox!
Does it produce only encrypted output, or can it optionally produce unencrypted results also? Can it optionally use public data as an input?
Also I am guessing if it could be accelerated on GPUs. I worked with a guy who accelerated a standard FFT on CUDA 100..1000 times for scientific computations (and later NVidia copied his code, lol). I wonder if something similar can be done here
It basically allows some untrusted party to convert ciphertext which you can decrypt to a ciphertext which someone you granted access to can decrypt.
It's like "instead of decrypting my data and encrypting with Bob's public key I want Charlie to do this operation without showing my secrets to Charlie". Charlie is a miner in our case :-)
I think, the biggest latency hit will be from re-encrypting a symmetric key which encrypts messages, once in a while. This will result in occasional delays of ~0.25 ms (that's how much one operation with elliptic curve crypto takes).
The other bottleneck will be from the block cipher, when you actually encrypt/decrypt messages. Our open source version currently doesn't use AES-NI for that, so limited by performance of unaccelerated AES256 (few hundred k messages per second). This impact can be made negligible when using AES-NI (will come soon).
When using granular encryption, the performance bottleneck will shift to parsing messages (avro, for example), and will be limited by the performance of the parser.
One can detect magnetic fields from a shielded laptop, even many meters away, and figure out what's happening inside (e.g. leaking secrets etc).
I think, not a terribly difficult experiment, but nobody has performed it: need ultracool physicists and hackers in one lab room