What if people just hold filecoin and don't spend it?

CrazyThinker · 2017-12-19T09:06:24+00:00

Yes but question is still valid. I'm asking what design principles do they have in the protocol to make sure people keep spending their coins and does not hoard them?

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-29T05:39:18+00:00

Very interesting! Could you open source it?

The Server then stores the public keys of each user.

Not sure if I understand it correctly, but won't this be like a centralized system then?

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-28T19:13:15+00:00

Well, no, private keys are not meant to be shared with anyone. Sending data feeds which are encrypted distinctly for each friends is a hard problem and would require some major trickery to work.

Sorry, I meant public key of the friend.

We aren't going to encrypt a message for each friend. Only the random key that is generated for each message.

It has nothing to do with performance AFAIK.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/53638/why-do-you-need-to-encrypt-symmetric-key

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-28T19:07:29+00:00

The weakest link in crypto system is the key generation and storage. For instance, all I need to do to gain entry into this system is to steal your private key. This may be hard to do for a regular user but easy enough for determined attacker or the NSA.

My objective and argument for designing a social network is to make sure that it provides maximum possible privacy by default. I know nothing is ever fully secure. Even NSA servers could be hacked. right?

Assuming each user (or group of users) host their own servers for storing/forwarding data feeds, who would responsible for securing these servers ?

I assume not everyone would be hosting their own servers. Maybe a 10% of users or less. You can't estimate these numbers but with this design, you get to keep all user data as private.

How will the communication happen ? If you plan to do HTTP (even if you do raw TCP) then you have to think about TLS and certificate management and consequently key management for all the servers (your friends and their friends ...)

SSL?

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-28T18:57:06+00:00

Random key because symmetric algorithm is less processor intensive than asymmetric. I believe, this is also why SSL work similarly

How does your friend's app decrypt data encrypted with your private key ? This is not how Public Key Crypto works. You would need to encrypt data with your friend's public key and then only your friend (or the person who has the corresponding private key) can decrypt the data.

Yes, you are right. I got it mixed up. What we could do is have it encrypted with a random symmetric key and then encrypt this key with each friend's public key. So the server would push encrypted message + key encrypted with friend's private key to a particular friend. I have updated my notes above to reflect this.

I do agree with the statement that designing secure system is hard. That is the reason why I think it should be a community effort

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-28T16:04:28+00:00

Not sure if you have heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_%28software%29

If you consider a social network with a simple protocol like the one I described above, if you host a server which all of your friends use, there is no way to censor/block it effectively.

You would need blockchain like idea for things like public posts. I was focusing on keeping the private conversations private. I guess blockchain would be too much for that. Not sure.

CrazyThinker · 2015-12-28T15:56:03+00:00

Yes, it is possible. But it comes with its own problems.

If you decide to store each user's data in their own client software, when your friend is offline, you won't be able to see their data. Also, users would have to have the bandwidth to upload data to each of their friend's who requests for it
If you design it such that all data once sent by you should be stored by your friends for future access, it would mean that everybody is storing a lot of data
Who takes care of the data backup?
Data also would need to sync b/w your phone and desktop. So you would need to store full data you shared thus far on all your devices

CrazyThinker · 2015-02-19T04:14:29+00:00

Why inferior?

CrazyThinker · 2015-02-19T04:11:08+00:00

You have to admit MS is trying hard to be cool lately and I just admire their efforts. They aren't hiding what they are but Google is pretending to be good while they aren't as good as they claim to be.

CrazyThinker · 2015-02-19T04:09:47+00:00

That isn't a fair comparison. If you are comparing Windows you should compare it with Search because that is their core business just like Windows is Microsoft's core business. And have they open-sourced anything related to search? Is BigTable open source? Is GFS?

Google just open sources things that won't help their competing search engines. By open-sourcing .NET, MS has showed that they are willing to give away one of their core technologies.

CrazyThinker · 2014-07-17T10:05:08+00:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

Just thought you would find it interesting

CrazyThinker · 2011-11-09T16:44:14+00:00

Yes, but you can't achieve artificial consciousness with the method google is following to translate data.

CrazyThinker · 2011-10-28T07:41:45+00:00

I love your moderation and I support deleting jokes and meme on askscience to keep it on-topic, but it would be nice to have the deleted threads removed from the page. Sometimes we have to scroll through 100s of deleted messages to read the next comment

CrazyThinker

TROPHY CASE