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...
Found the article. Seems like I was off on the cost ($64k, not six-figures), but here's the whole thing if you want to die inside: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mysterious-bitcoiner-spends-64k-inscribe-9mb-of-data-on-bitcoin
@Alex If I had $64k to spend on storing 9MB of encrypted data in a publicly accessible space, I would put it in an S3-ish bucket and keep the other $63,998 of it.
@Alex also extremely amused by this guy looking at raw binary dumped into a terminal and going „oh there’s greek and math symbols here“
@Alex anyways my best guess is it‘s something illegal (optimistically, a Metallica song, pessimistically, child porn) and the guy is waiting a bit for the data to become near unremovable before dropping the key or download script or whatever, to make some sort of point (unsure what point). That seems like a bitcoiner thing to do.
@Alex actually nevermind that I forgot what bitcoin is like for a second. surely it's some scam.
@Alex 5-figures is still a lot!
... and it's also hilarious that ord.io shared a *screenshot* of the data rendered as *text* while asking if anyone could decode it.
Their link doesn't seem to make the data readily available either - it declares "application/octet-stream", but doesn't seem to actually show the raw content.
🤦
@Alex meh, 2/3 of six figures, so we round up. Or a ix figures Australian. Seven figures in Yen. Close enough. 😎