How is it possible to steal Bitcoin?

The question

I posted the following question to Facebook a couple of days ago:

I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but how do people steal Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies? Isn’t everything supposed to be kept in a “ledger” to be valid? Maybe thieves find a way to convert it to regular money or something? Doesn’t the ledger track such conversions?

I got only two answers, one from Tunisia, one from nearby.

Jacer Omri

The only way i would think of, is to actually steal your private key (either by gaining access to your machine or to the storage where the pk is kept). I don’t know a way to get around if this happens.

Shawn Hartsock

Jacer Omri practically speaking yes. That’s it. The “anonymity” of a bitcoin transaction leans on the inability to tie a public/private key pair to a real-world identity. If you can tie a secret key to a person then bitcoin is the absolute opposite of private as every transaction is perfectly visible.

In most situations we’re worried about public/private key theft or hijacking.

Theft of bitcoin is possible through the typical ways that ledger manipulation is possible … however the combination of data validation and leader election by lottery reduces the probability of this significantly but it is still NOT a non-possibility.

In all consensus algorithms I know of, including bitcoin, if a majority of the “deciders” come to the wrong answer (a bad transaction is called valid) then it is still possible to steal bitcoin. This would also be true with regular fiat money too. Except that the “deciders” are a much smaller set of things like banks and credit agencies.

In bitcoin you would … for example … choke the network at a point to temporarily constrain the possible deciders in the lottery of deciders (I’m referring to bit mining here) to favor some of your fellow scammers/colluders then you would all agree to present the WRONG answer as the right one. This would steal bitcoins from a victim, eventually get the block sealed inside your constrained network … and create a rift in the chain of blocks.

This has actually happened several times with a few exchanges. There’s remediation steps and that’s all very much like auditing in real life.

This is as best as I understand it. I do have a blockchain related patent but I’m far from the world’s leading expert on the problem. The alternative technologies lean on a concept of consortiums … which is based on trust-worthiness of the “deciders” and that’s the same basic problem shifted into a human government. It has all the same problems except its much easier to fire someone over it … so better? It at least saves electricity that way I guess.

My patent happens to be around ways to build consortium clusters.

George Hussein Entenman … in short: not a silly question at all. The developer analogy I use is Blockchain is very much like a git repository. Bit mining is very much like a CI/CD. And there’s a process like a merge request. The fraud prevention leans on not doing a “merge request” when there’s fraud detected.

We need another Sputnik

Quotes from Politics & Ideas: How to Step Up the Tech Fight Against China - WSJ 2021-03-03. I found the article through my public library.

The U.S. is standing still. As recently as 2001,
America's annual investment in research and
development exceeded China's by more than $300
billion. But according to a recent report from the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chinese
investment exceeded ours for the first time ever
last year. During the past two decades, China's
research and development as a share of its economy
has more than tripled.

There are other indications of the U.S. slipping.
Over the past two decades, the number of
bachelor's degrees China awards annually has more
than quadrupled and now exceeds that of America,
the European Union and Japan combined. Although
the U.S. continues to grant more doctoral degrees
in science and engineering, the gap has narrowed
significantly.

Two decades ago, American researchers published
four times as many peer-reviewed articles in the
science and engineering disciplines than their
counterparts in China. China received fewer than
20,000 patents two decades ago, but this figure
rose to more than 400,000 by 2018, exceeding
annual U.S. patent grants by more than 100,000.

Still trying to understand the word “intersectionality”

The introduction to the MIT Press book Data Feminism tries to define intersectionality.

Key to the idea of intersectionality is that it
does not only describe the intersecting aspects of
any particular person’s identity (or
positionalities, as they are sometimes termed).
It also describes the intersecting forces of
privilege and oppression at work in a given
society. Oppression involves the systematic
mistreatment of certain groups of people by other
groups. It happens when power is not distributed
equally—when one group controls the institutions
of law, education, and culture, and uses its power
to systematically exclude other groups while
giving its own group unfair advantages (or simply
maintaining the status quo). In the case of
gender oppression, we can point to the sexism,
cissexism, and patriarchy that is evident in
everything from political representation to the
wage gap to who speaks more often (or more loudly)
in a meeting. In the case of racial oppression,
this takes the form of racism and white supremacy.
Other forms of oppression include ableism,
colonialism, and classism. Each has its particular
history and manifests differently in different
cultures and contexts, but all involve a dominant
group that accrues power and privilege at the
expense of others. Moreover, these forces of power
and privilege on the one hand and oppression on
the other mesh together in ways that multiply
their effects.

The book discusses …

...what we call data feminism: a way of thinking
about data, both their uses and their limits, that
is informed by direct experience, by a commitment
to action, and by intersectional feminist thought.
The starting point for data feminism is
something that goes mostly unacknowledged in data
science: power is not distributed equally in the
world. Those who wield power are
disproportionately elite, straight, white,
able-bodied, cisgender men from the Global
North. The work of data feminism is first to
tune into how standard practices in data science
serve to reinforce these existing inequalities and
second to use data science to challenge and change
the distribution of power.

What counts as ‘data’?

We both strongly believe that data can do good in the world. But for it to do so, we must explicitly acknowledge that a key way that power and privilege operate in the world today has to do with the word data itself. The word dates to the mid-seventeenth century, when it was introduced to supplement existing terms such as evidence and fact. Identifying information as data, rather than as either of those other two terms, served a rhetorical purpose. It converted otherwise debatable information into the solid basis for subsequent claims. But what information needs to become data before it can be trusted? Or, more precisely, whose information needs to become data before it can be considered as fact and acted upon? Data feminism must answer these questions, too.

Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler (review)

This is inspired by a book review in the WSJ 2021-03-03 by Matthew Hutson. I found it through my public library.

In a single sentence tucked away in the foreword
to Richard Dawkins's 1976 book "The Selfish Gene,"
the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers offered a
powerful idea: We've evolved to fool ourselves the
better to keep "the subtle signs of self
knowledge" from undermining our tall tales with
tells.

Our willingness to participate in fictions makes
storytelling a particularly powerful force.
Messrs. Vedantam and Mesler suggest novels require
a bit of belief to keep us enthralled, and
advertising turns on our buying into brand
narratives. Golfers performed better when told
they had Nike clubs. More important, group
cohesion flows from investment in origin stories,
a belief that something unseen ties us together.
Ceremonies and other rituals can make these tales
visceral, and groups from college fraternities to
nations – motley populations otherwise defined
by little more than lines on a map – rely on
fake-it-till-you-make-it solidarity to do things
like land on the moon. Religions trade in the
power of stories too: Evidence suggests fear of
angry gods bootstrapped altruism toward strangers
until we could put the modern state in place. Such
suspensions of skepticism, the authors write, "are
responsible for creating some of the crowning
glories of human civilization."


And what about love? What Messrs. Vedantam and
Mesler mean when they talk about love is, you
guessed it, self-deception. Don't blame science
writers for this romantic dose of realism; word is
long out. Take it from Fleetwood Mac: "Tell me
lies, tell me sweet little lies." (Or George
Bernard Shaw, with a quote the authors would
appreciate: "Love is a gross exaggeration of the
difference between one person and everybody
else.") One study found that the more participants
valued a given trait, the more they overestimated
its quantity in their partners – and in turn
the happier they were.

Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College

What I gather from this NY Times article:

• Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.
• Ms Kanoute apparently thought that the officer “could have been carrying a ‘lethal weapon’” even though college officers were unarmed.
• Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, told Ms. Kanoute that she was in a cafeteria which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children.
• Because of the presence of young children, the janitor has been instructed to call security in such cases. He did. He did not mention Ms. Kanoute’s race or gender.
• Because the janitor, who has poor eyesight, was not sure if he was looking at a man or woman, Ms Kanoute would later accuse him of “misgendering” her.
• Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, “… is the racist person.”
• Ms. Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system that is triggered by stress.
• Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, Ms Blair found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.
• Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, “… [was not] particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.” “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”
• Kanoute and ACLU are demanding a separate dorm for students of color.
• All university employees involved were white.

Of course, I don’t know what “really” happened.

I am troubled, however, by the words of the ACLU attorney, if quoted correctly. Having people call you at home, leave messages on your mailbox and online, etc. may not be “on a par with the consequences of actual racism,” but it can be highly traumatic. Saying that Ms Blair was “offended” surely trivializes her reactions. His insensitivity towards Ms Blair offends me, a long-time member of the ACLU.

Should models look at the camera?

An article appeared in the 2021-02-23 edition of our WSJ with the title, Should Models in Ads Look Directly at The Camera? Research Has an Answer: A new study says that it depends on the intended message.

Narrative Transportation Theory

The WSJ article talks about

...social psychology's narrative transportation
theory, which suggests that when people get lost
in a visual narrative, that story can shape their
attitudes. Marketing researchers have established
that when observers feel transported while viewing
ads, they tend to respond to those ads favorably.
Until now, according to Dr. Patrick, no research
had been conducted to determine what affect an ad
model's gaze has on whether viewers feel transported.

Abstract of the original article

The WSJ article draws on an article in the Journal of Consumer Research entitled How the Eyes Connect to the Heart: The Influence of Eye Gaze Direction on Advertising Effectiveness by Rita Ngoc To and Vanessa M Patrick. (Journal of Consumer Research, ucaa063, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaa063). Published 22 February 2021.

This article finds evidence that a subject looking directly at the camera will be more persuasive than an averted gaze when trying to inform the viewer of something.

OTOH, the averted gaze is more effective in drawing the viewer into narrative.

A model’s eyes are a powerful and ubiquitous
visual feature in virtually any advertisement
depicting a person. But does where the ad model’s
eyes look matter? Integrating insights from social
psychology and performance and visual art theory,
we demonstrate that when the ad model’s gaze is
averted (looking away from the viewer), the viewer
is more readily transported into the ad narrative
and responds more favorably to the ad than when
the ad model’s gaze is direct (looking directly at
the viewer). Five multi-method experiments (field
and lab studies) illustrate that averted gaze
(direct gaze) enhances narrative transportation
(spokesperson credibility) to boost the
effectiveness of emotional (informative) ads.
Study 1 is a Facebook field study that
demonstrates the effect of averted (vs. direct)
gaze direction on advertising effectiveness using
a real brand. Studies 2a and 2b implicate enhanced
narrative transportation as the underlying process
mechanism by measuring (study 2a) and manipulating
(study 2b) narrative transportation. Studies 3a
and 3b examine ad contexts in which direct gaze
can enhance ad effectiveness: when the ad has
informational (vs. emotional) appeal (study 3a),
and when the viewer prefers not to identify with
the negative emotional content of the ad (study 3b).

keywords: eye gaze, advertising effectiveness, emotional (informative) ad appeals, narrative transportation

The article itself is paywalled.