April 29, 2016 | Author: Mircea Popescu

Motto: Recall [V]ictory ?

[P]ermanence should be the world's first AAIi. It'd consist of :

  1. An ircii bot for communicating with The Lordship.
  2. A box acquision module.iii
  3. A cryptographic module.iv
  4. Av Bitcoin node in a secure configuration, with wallets.

The functionality contemplated here is that upon receiving a $boxdeploy command from an acceptable signature, [P]ermanence responds within a reasonable timeframe with login credentials, delivered much in the manner deedbot presently provides OTPs.

The OS environment in which [P]ermanence itself runs, as well as the environment in which it creates accounts is tbd, with the mention that absent a homomorphic encryption solution, spreading the data in some sort of encrypted database model across physical machines would be probably the best solution. In any case the first goal of [P]ermanence hardening is to make an attacker unable to obtain usable data from subverting n/2+1 machines at any given moment ; and for [P]ermanence to self-destruct if it ever loses n/2-1 machines at any point. Whether these two conditions can be satisfied by protocol rather than by promise is the most important determinant of the utility of the whole shebang.

Ultimately, [P]ermanence must be capable of disabling, completely and for any desired interval up to permanently, any computing infrastructure, such as operated by any individual or group however defined, up to the total of all installed computing infrastructure operated by anyone anywhere. This "any" knows absolutely no bounds, if in the future someone somewhere makes a computing anything outside of the Internet, [P]ermanence makes a nuclear sub and glasses the spot.

Obviously, throwing all this together out of and on top of all the leaky "modern" software is a taller order than making a proper Bitcoin. Nevertheless, [P]ermanence is necessary and unavoidable, so might as well start thinking about it. The goal of overpowering the entire world may well seem far fetched, but the strict reality of the matter is that, much as in the case of the very Bitcoin that spawned the Republic, we actually have all the tools required. It's not a matter of great leaps of faith or imagination being required (except perhaps as pertains to homomorphisms), but merely a matter of patiently, diligently and correctly applying things we already mostly understand and mostly have.vi

To arms! And may we all live to see a world which harbors no intelligent life outside the WoT.

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  1. Autonomous Artificial Intelligence. []
  2. To be supplanted with gossipd later on. []
  3. At first, this can consist of a simple list of IPs and root credentials. Eventually to be expanded to include an actual mechanism to rent dedicated servers from companies ; to score the providers according to its own, (self-revised) rules, and to find them in the first place (which later task will include running a complete web crawler, exactly like Google - only better). Even more eventually to supplement this with active 0-day discovery and exploitation. []
  4. To replace SSH entirely. To be based on the eventual winner of TMSR's cipher competition. []
  5. The grammatical singular implies nothing about actual implementation. []
  6. Mention of the LOIC, because. []
Category : Bitcoin  | 10 responses.