I laughed at that too. I know its a funny conspiracy theory, but this is just what a government who lets cops shoot you because they shout "gun" would say.
I once told the police that a man was sneaking through the front garden of a nearby house with a hand gun. So they did the natural thing - took my money and put me in jail, let me out next morning.
- several retired US military members have had "a talking to" for writing biographies.
- several people with US citizenship have been "droned" in the Middle East without a trial.
- it's pretty common to plant "classified" documents during military-related investigations. Usually at trial some are found to be unclassified, or were unavailable to the defendant, and the govt. withdraws the complaint ... after a couple of years pass.
If you do solve it, do it on a completely offline computer, running MS-DOS with no network cards. Don't ever plug in a USB or other drive. Only write to floppy disks which you've bulk erased then formatted first for your backups. (That should prevent your secret from leaking, if you keep quiet)
Your only safe bet, in my opinion, is to disclose your algorithm widely in such a manner as all copies can't be vacuumed up.
However, know that the disclosure of such a factoring algorithm will have far reaching and unpredictable consequences.
You could try to take advantage of it by breaking some old unused bitcoin wallets, but the money would be tracked to you eventually, and you'd be subjected to physical attack to disclose it (your algorithm) exclusively, then killed. Theoretically you could time it with disclosure, but you're then risking criminal charges for the theft of the bitcoins.
But how would anyone figure out you had such an algo? Only maybe the wallet owners could suspect it, and good chance they are in no position to do anything.
That's not my point: How would they tell they your transaction is not legitimate, but the result of cracking the code? How would some random wallet owner influence local police?
We should assume NSA (and a lot of cryptocurrency nerds) is already monitoring the addresses of those old bitcoin wallets as a canary for someone making such a discovery.
> We should assume NSA (and a lot of cryptocurrency nerds) is already monitoring the addresses of those old bitcoin wallets as a canary for someone making such a discovery.
I bet the NSA has better things to do than that, cryptocurrency nerds on the other hand...
It all depends on the amounts I would think. If you take several lower valued old wallets over a larger period of time, I would think you can rake a few million without anyone thinking twice about it. The problem with people trying to hide things is of course that they always get too greedy.
It would be an extremely exciting problem to have. I’d force myself to spend a solid month of full time, long days and late nights devising the safest way to deal with it which improves rather than threatens my life priorities.
It would be entirely possible that my end decision would be to never tell anyone.
editorialization of this question on HN is bugging me:
"If I solve integer factorization, will I get killed for breaking cryptography?" reads as "If I solve integer factorization and start actively breaking cryptography (snoop and steal), will I get killed?" - the answer is yes, most likely.
Where the original question in quora is completely different: "If I solve integer factorization, will I get killed because I would have broken cryptography?" - the answer is no (no with "but again, it depends").
Pragmatically, eurekas are rare enough that killing one person with a eureka may well prevent anyone else from solving how they did it, or building on their work, for a very long time.
Yes, so if you got a time machine and eliminated Isaac Newton...
A world changing discovery or invention may seem like a unique magical achievement to the average person, but the question is, how likely is it for the second most suited person to accomplish it? Is it likely that there's a huge gap on average?
> tasked with developing new, stronger adhesives. However, the sticky “microspheres” he invented were neither very strong nor permanent
[6 years later]
> a new product development researcher at 3M, was singing one night at church and wondered if he could make a bookmark that would stick to his hymnal but not damage the page after removing it
Yes, in theory, these two events could have been replaced, or even both independently occurred to the same person instead of two — but how much longer might it have taken for that to occur, and why didn't anyone think of it sooner?
Blu Tack was invented in 1968, and that weak adhesive above was invented in 1969, so Blu Tack had their 'weak adhesive' product on the market a decade before 3M had theirs. So, why aren't they called Tack-It Notes?
Technically we could have had Post-Its any time from 1968 onward, but it took until 1974 for wish for a sticky bookmark and to know that a weak adhesive existed. That's the irreplaceable person in this story, and without them, it could have easily been years or decades before someone else considered this.
I feel like there's a vague analogy to the birthday paradox, where when you fix one thing and think about other things matching up, the conjunction seems unlikely, but when you stop trying to hold one side still, you can see the probability is much higher.
The big problem there is not that he does it, but that it can be done. You can't be sure if someone else (i.e. some intelligence agencies) know it already, and is actively breaking encryption, even if he doesn't. Your encryption is by definition not safe, and everyone should change it.
Unless, of course, it requires magical/unachievable technology like some impossible yet quantum computer or hundreds of years.
Maybe you'll get hired/kidnapped by the NSA. But seriously, this isn't going to happen, it's not been solved despite the best brains on the planet trying for decades.
Why not? It took over 350 years for people to crack Fermat's Last Theorem. Some Hilbert's problems also took very long to crack but were finally solved.
41 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadLol at this. Just keep broadening the definition of traitor until they get there.
Fairly recently there was a crazy guy who shouted "gun" (or "he's got a gun") near a cop, and the cop shot him.
In other words, they will assume you're speaking in the third person about yourself, if you say "gun".
Not that, for instance, you are observing that the officer has a gun and is dangerous.
- several retired US military members have had "a talking to" for writing biographies.
- several people with US citizenship have been "droned" in the Middle East without a trial.
- it's pretty common to plant "classified" documents during military-related investigations. Usually at trial some are found to be unclassified, or were unavailable to the defendant, and the govt. withdraws the complaint ... after a couple of years pass.
- then there's Snowden ...
Your only safe bet, in my opinion, is to disclose your algorithm widely in such a manner as all copies can't be vacuumed up.
However, know that the disclosure of such a factoring algorithm will have far reaching and unpredictable consequences.
You could try to take advantage of it by breaking some old unused bitcoin wallets, but the money would be tracked to you eventually, and you'd be subjected to physical attack to disclose it (your algorithm) exclusively, then killed. Theoretically you could time it with disclosure, but you're then risking criminal charges for the theft of the bitcoins.
I bet the NSA has better things to do than that, cryptocurrency nerds on the other hand...
It would be entirely possible that my end decision would be to never tell anyone.
Its the Cycle of technology
"If I solve integer factorization, will I get killed for breaking cryptography?" reads as "If I solve integer factorization and start actively breaking cryptography (snoop and steal), will I get killed?" - the answer is yes, most likely.
Where the original question in quora is completely different: "If I solve integer factorization, will I get killed because I would have broken cryptography?" - the answer is no (no with "but again, it depends").
In (1a) or (2), then why kill the discoverer, because if one person figured it out, someone else will.
I'm not sure this is how everybody does/would think, but it seems common-sense-ish to me. For example, Newton/Leibniz.
It’s often just time for the discovery to be made, because of all the proceeding work.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
A world changing discovery or invention may seem like a unique magical achievement to the average person, but the question is, how likely is it for the second most suited person to accomplish it? Is it likely that there's a huge gap on average?
https://www.invent.org/blog/trends-stem/who-invented-post-it...
> tasked with developing new, stronger adhesives. However, the sticky “microspheres” he invented were neither very strong nor permanent
[6 years later]
> a new product development researcher at 3M, was singing one night at church and wondered if he could make a bookmark that would stick to his hymnal but not damage the page after removing it
Yes, in theory, these two events could have been replaced, or even both independently occurred to the same person instead of two — but how much longer might it have taken for that to occur, and why didn't anyone think of it sooner?
Blu Tack was invented in 1968, and that weak adhesive above was invented in 1969, so Blu Tack had their 'weak adhesive' product on the market a decade before 3M had theirs. So, why aren't they called Tack-It Notes?
Technically we could have had Post-Its any time from 1968 onward, but it took until 1974 for wish for a sticky bookmark and to know that a weak adhesive existed. That's the irreplaceable person in this story, and without them, it could have easily been years or decades before someone else considered this.
Unless, of course, it requires magical/unachievable technology like some impossible yet quantum computer or hundreds of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
Whistler, Mother, and Carl investigate the box, finding it capable of breaking the encryption of nearly every computer system.
Nick related.
"The Brain tells a mathematical horror story": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9rTkVlbTcQ