Cryptocurrency people are so funny. Recently someone with deep pockets spent six-figures embedding 9MB of encrypted data into the BTC blockchain.
I read a write-up about it one some website dedicated to cryptocurrency, and the author was especially impressed with the fact that encrypted data cannot be decrypted without a key. He noted that "not even ChatGPT could decrypt it".
Of course Cryptocurrency people don't understand cryptography... That's why they buy pretend internet money.
There is something so incredibly funny to me about watching a journalist that specializes in Cryptocurrency encountering a 9MB blob of encrypted data, and marveling over the fact that a language model couldn't magically break the cypher.
And then to tell the world that this is how he tried to decrypt data, with zero awareness that they're saying something devastatingly stupid to anyone who actually understands the topic.
And cryptography is literally the backbone of the tech he covers...
@Alex That's funny, but what truly irks me is that they stole the term "crypto" T_T crypto used to be cool!
(also TIL that cypher is an alternative spelling of cipher! ... or the other way around I guess)
@mort As someone very much into actual cryptography, Cryptocurrencies were of huge interest to me when Bitcoin was a new thing.
The "experts" today that are completely divorced from cryptography and only care about market hype have thoroughly convinced me to never touch a blockchain-related product ever again, because I never see anyone who actually knows what they're talking about endorse this stuff.
@Alex Hey I was the exact same way! Learning about cryptocurrencies in the early days was really interesting, it's a neat concept of a distributed append-only database which anyone can append to according to agreed-upon rules and which requires control over 50+% of the computing power of the network to attack. I implemented a stratum bitcoin miner in JavaScript as a learning exercise!
But in the past few years, the fraudsters and gamblers have so totally taken over and the tech can't keep up :(