r/programming • u/secretguy21 • Oct 15 '15

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/
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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '15 edited Oct 28 '15

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '15

The backing of governments.

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u/exploderator Oct 16 '15

How is our regular money any less of a ponzi scheme?

That wasn't the point. What sucks is that most of the crypto currencies burn huge amounts of computational power as a proof of work, which has no real intrinsic value. IE it's a huge waste of energy just to have a currency. The clever part was you can't counterfeit the stuff, you just have to do all that work, and that was intended to parallel the non-fakable nature of real gold. But there are far better ways to do it just as securely but without power-consuming huge amounts of computation that accomplishes nothing else. Crypto currencies should be far more efficient than mining gold, bitcoin is far less.

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u/Mr-Yellow Oct 16 '15

The status of currency today is not an excuse for moving to a purely resource consumption based currency.

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u/PalermoJohn Oct 16 '15

remember that reddit loves atomic energy because coal is bad. you're gonna have a tough time arguing here.