Red Team Blues

Since I started my career as a Cassandra of Cryptocurrencies I haven't had much time to read novels; I have too much fun reading about the unfolding disasters. But I did enjoy Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Homeland, so when he asked me to review Red Team Blues I sat down and read it.

The first thing to catch my eye was the dedication to the late, great Dan Kaminsky, a fellow attendee of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop and someone I admired.

It is an engrossing read. The action moves swiftly, the plot requires little suspension of disbelief and has plenty of twists to keep you thinking. The interesting parts are the details about how people and their money can be tracked, and how people with a lot can prevent it being tracked. Doctorow gets to cover many of his favorite themes in a fast-moving story about a character approaching retirement. I'm well past that stage, but I understand some of those issues.

The story ends happily because all the bodies that pile up are bad guys. This is necessary since this is apparently the first in a series. I'll definitely read the next one.

You don't need to understand blockchains and cryptocurrencies to enjoy the story, but I do so, below the fold, I can't resist picking some nits with the technical details.

Compute In Storage

Tobias Mann's Los Alamos Taps Seagate To Put Compute On Spinning Rust describes progress in the concept of computational storage. I first discussed this in my 2010 JCDL keynote, based on 2009's FAWN, the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes by David Anderson et al from Carnegie-Mellon. Their work started from the observation that moving data from storage to memory for processing by a CPU takes time and energy, and the faster you do it the more energy it takes. So the less of it you do, the better. Below the fold I start from FAWN and end up with the work under way at Los Alamos.

How Bubbles Are Blown

Last October I wrote Non-Fungible Token Bubble Lasted 10 Months. The NFT market is still dead, a fossil relic of a massive wave of typical cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes and wash trading. But the great thing is that this all happened on a public blockchain, so data palaeontologists have an unrivalled dataset with which to unearth the inner workings of a speculative bubble.

Bryce Elder's What NFT mania can tell us about market bubbles points us to NFT Bubbles in which Andrea Barbon and Angelo Ranaldo do just that. Their abstract states:

Our study reveals that agent-level variables, such as investor sophistication, heterogeneity, and wash trading, in addition to aggregate variables, such as volatility, price acceleration, and turnover, significantly predict bubble formation and price crashes. We find that sophisticated investors consistently outperform others and exhibit characteristics consistent with superior information and skills, supporting the narrative surrounding asset pricing bubbles.

Below the fold I discuss the details.

Two Great Reads

This post is to flag two great posts by authors always worth reading, both related to the sad state of the venture capital industry upon which I have pontificated several times:

• Molly White's The venture capitalist's dilemma.
• Fais Khan's Zero Knowledge Influencer: Are ZKPs Worth the Hype?.

Each will reward your time. Below the fold I comment on both of them.

More Cryptocurrency Gaslighting

Ignacio de Gregorio is a "crypto expert" with 8.5K followers on Medium and he's worried. In The one word that can kill Crypto is back he discusses the New York Attorney General's suit agains KuCoin and, once again, demonstrates how gaslighting is central to the arguments supporting cryptocurrencies. Below the fold I point out the flaws in his argument.

C720 Linux Update

The three Acer C720 Chromebooks I wrote about in:

• 2014's A Note of Thanks,
• 2017's Travels with a Chromebook,
• and 2021's Chromebook Linux Update

are all still running Linux just fine despite the one I'm typing on being more than 8 years old. Below the fold I have some good news and some no-so-good news.

I was becoming a little concerned by the fact that the 5.0-series kernel I was stuck with was getting long in the tooth. So as an experiment I wiped C720 #3 and:

• Installed Mint 21.1 from scratch with LVM and full-disk encryption.
• Installed Mint 21.1 from scratch without full-disk encryption and with encrypted home directory, and updated to the current 5.15.0-67 kernel.

Below the fold, my notes on these experiments.

On Trusting Trustlessness

Nearly five years ago some bad guys used "administrative backdoors" in a "smart contract" to steal $23.5M from Bancor. In response I wrote DINO and IINO pointing out a fundamental problem with "smart contracts" built on blockchains. The technology was sold as "trustless":

A major misconception about blockchains is that they provide a basis of trust. A better perspective is that blockchains eliminate the need for trust.

But the "smart contracts" could either be:

• immutable, implying that you are trusting the developers to write perfect code, which frequently turns out to be a mistake,
• or upgradable, implying that you are trusting those with the keys to the contract, which frequently turns out to be a mistake.

The "smart contract" either is or is not mutable after deployment, there is no third possibility. Both cases require trust.

Now, in response to some good guys using an "unknown vulnerability" in a smart contract to recover $140M in coins looted in the Wormhole exploit, Molly White wrote The Oasis "counter-hack" and the centralization of defi on the same topic. Below the fold, I comment on her much better, much more detailed discussion of the implications of "smart contracts" that can be upgraded arbitrarily changed by their owners.