Ep. 170 NFTension

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On this week's episode of the Unhashed Podcast, it's just Colin and Ruben, and they have a lot to talk about (not to mention the sizzling sexual tension as they do). What are the ethics of shilling (especially NFTs)? Craig Wright wants all the Satoshi BSV coins. Why have miners made the US their new home? And can quantum computers ever really live up to the hype? Do we want them to? All this and much more - listen now!

  1. Mark Webber at the University of Sussex, UK, and his colleagues have investigated how large a quantum computer you would need to break bitcoin, in terms of the number of qubits, or quantum bits, the equivalent of ordinary computing bits. “The transactions get announced and there’s a key associated with that transaction,” says Webber. “And there’s a finite window of time that that key is vulnerable and that varies, but it’s usually around 10 minutes to an hour, maybe a day.” Webber’s team calculated that breaking bitcoin’s encryption in a 10-minute window would require a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits, while cracking it in an hour would require a machine with 317 million qubits. Even allowing for a whole day, this figure only drops to 13 million qubits. This is reassuring news for bitcoin owners because current machines have only a tiny fraction of this – IBM’s record-breaking superconducting quantum computer has only 127 qubits, so devices would need to become a million times larger to threaten the cryptocurrency, something Webber says is unlikely to happen for a decade. Although bitcoin is secure for the foreseeable future, there are concerns about other encrypted data with a much wider window of vulnerability. An encrypted email sent today can be harvested, stored and decrypted in the future once a quantum computer is available – a so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attack, which some security experts believe is already happening. “People are already worried because you can save encrypted messages right now and decrypt them in the future,” says Webber. “So there’s a big concern we need to urgently change our encryption techniques, because in the future, they’re not secure.”

  2. Since China outlawed cryptocurrency mining in June 2021, neighboring country Kazakhstan had become a significant location for Bitcoin miners. The expanse of space, warehouses and factories meant that mining rigs could be easily installed and powered at a lower cost than other Bitcoin-hungry locations. In January 2022, rising fuel prices triggered deadly riots in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest metropolis, with internet shutdowns being enacted and Russian-led military troops being called into the country in a bid to help stabilise the situation. As a result, 15–20% of the world’s Bitcoin mining capacity was knocked completely offline and the Bitcoin price fell to a low not seen since September 2021. Since the China shutdown, the US has held the top spot, with one-third of Bitcoin’s hashrate – the computing and processing power used for Bitcoin mining – coming from the country. Kazakhstan in comparison had been in second place and responsible for 18% of the hashrate, but following the unrest this dropped to approximately 8%, according to data from BTC.com. Cryptocurrency insights company Arcane Research estimated that the internet shutdowns across six days could have cost Kazakhstan Bitcoin miners approximately $20m (Tg8.7bn). However, Alan Dorjiyev, president of the National Association of Blockchain and Data Centres Industry in Kazakhstan, believes that the issues experienced by Bitcoin miners in the country are now over. He says there is no threat of further internet shutdowns, but should accessibility issues occur, mining farmers are considering satellite options to ensure there is a reserve connection to the internet.

  3. CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) is a soft fork proposal for Bitcoin specified in the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 119. It aims to enable new use cases for the network by adding a basic type of “covenant,” or smart contract, which is more than what can be achieved at the moment. Bitcoin, as is, doesn’t possess a lot of flexibility in its programmability at the base level of transactions — and certainly not as much flexibility as it has at the level of the public and private keys used to sign transactions. A programmer can currently control the inputs of a transaction with Bitcoin Script, restricting what can be done before a transaction is spent, but they can’t control what types of transaction are permitted to be signed for. In other words, in most Bitcoin smart contracts today, a user can control how a coin can be unlocked by defining restrictions necessary to be satisfied. But they can’t control very well what can be done with that coin once it is unlocked. For instance, one can define a certain amount of time before a transaction can be spent with a timelock, effectively locking that transaction until the specified block height is reached. In this case, restrictions are being imposed on when funds can be spent, preventing the correct key from unlocking those funds and spending them. However, after that time expires and the block height is reached on the Bitcoin blockchain, the key can unlock those funds and spend them freely. The when is restricted, but not the what or how. Therefore, covenants have the power to unlock a new set of possibilities to the way Bitcoin can be programmed by enabling a pre-definition of which outputs are acceptable, instead of just controlling the inputs. Although complex covenants with endless possibilities could bring security risks to the network by potentially enabling unexpected or unintended consequences, the proposal for CTV is, for the most part, simple. More importantly, CTV allows these spending restrictions to be enforced non-interactively. Some use cases enabled by CTV could be made possible today, but most of the time the set of users participating in the smart contract arrangement would need to be online and manually interact to coordinate the spending rules, which isn’t always possible. CTV enables these restrictions to be enforced programmatically, without requiring manual interaction by participants, hence increasing the reliability of the covenant.

  4. Bitcoin miner CleanSpark doubled its computing power over the past three months to reach 2 exahash per second (EH/s), joining the ranks of top publicly traded North American miners. The Las Vegas-based miner is now producing around 10 bitcoins per day “sustainably” and expects to add more capacity. “We have more capacity coming, in terms of both machines and access to additional energy,” CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford said in a statement. “In fact, we believe we are one of the most efficient miners in terms of hashrate per megawatt and we are on track to maintain that,” he added. The 2 EH/s puts CleanSpak among the ranks of top North American miners, such as Hut 8, Hive Blockchain and Bitfarms, which all have hashrates at roughly similar levels, as indicated by their December production updates.

  5. (Related tweet: https://twitter.com/HollanderAdam/status/1484246971208642577) – Twitter today is introducing a new feature that will allow users to show off their NFTs, or non-fungible tokens — a way to certify digital assets stored on the blockchain. The company is rolling out NFT Profile Pictures to Twitter Blue subscribers on iOS by way of Twitter Blue’s early access Labs feature. Support for Twitter’s NFT product will later roll out to Android users and the web. However, while only iOS users will have the ability to set their NFT as their profile picture, everyone on Twitter will be able to see the new hexa-shaped picture no matter what platform they’re currently using, Twitter says. The Twitter Blue subscription service is not yet globally available, which will limit the adoption of NFT Profile Pictures to the early markets where the offering is now live — the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The company had earlier hinted toward its plans to more fully embrace NFTs, which has become a big topic of conversation on the platform. Many crypto-enthusiasts have also already set their profile picture to a photo of their NFT, as Twitter had not yet offered any official means of authenticating with a user’s crypto wallet and verifying ownership. – https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/20/twitter-blue-subscription-users-are-first-gain-access-to-a-new-nft-profile-picture-feature/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAES-xf53pCZFkTGiTuqD8mSPeDc-JCvgW3fXgV0PTk3IcFdE1PW7GG7Yj5UMwvVeZ1mRXKQVQdvybe-fkOZJQxxVHtsCeabiXqC5RLKEnamkfYzubwrJ7DAITyNQTE4O39u8O9e0o-jcCvjxOTMO5XQV2Hj-9g7CndkmZ47gtfrt

  6. Craig Wright sued Bitcoin developers, [bla bla bla], “a firm called nChain Ltd is ""said to be working on a modification to the existing BSV client software, which would enable someone who owns but cannot access the BSV to regain control of them."" – https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/19/craig_wright_bitcoin_sv_high_court_sueball/

  7. https://twitter.com/theinstagibbs/status/1482488128828952581

  8. https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1481984327881736193

  9. https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1481717424118448132

  10. https://twitter.com/JWWeatherman_/status/1485076310896611328?s=20

  11. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/s2wow7/fidelity_is_one_of_the_largest_asset_managers_in

Colin aulds