No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Not long ago the Coldcard hardware wallet had an issue where it'd fallback to a 32-bit only RNG that could be cracked and so many people got their coins stolen.
Now it's Ledger that sees tampered devices all around the world (in Asia for sure but now there are reports about reseller in the EU selling backdoored/eSIM'ed devices).
For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands (meaning being able to sign a 2-of-2 wallets requires hardware wallets from two different vendors).
When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.
Yet here we are.
And Ledger is responsible for very poor security practices: for example it's impossible to use a Ledger hardware wallet in a fully airgapped/offline way. For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.
Which is complete and total amateur hour.
In addition to that Ledger offers a service to "backup your seed": what could possibly go wrong with that uh?
I'm betting that we'll soon hear about hardware wallets getting drained due to the seed being exfiltrated through "randomness" in how transactions are built/signed (aka "kleptography").
And it's not just representative about people in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem: people simply don't understand computer security and don't understand the potential attacks nor the length at which attackers are willing to go to steal data/funds/ruin other people's lives.
At this point we've heard about chips' plans being modified before the chips are even built (only to lower the entropy of RNGs) [unrelated to cryptocurrencies btw], a worldwide backdoor attempt in SSH, eSIM sending secrets from hardware wallets with tiny attack surfaces.
You're not anywhere near paranoid enough.
It speaks a lot to the power of financial incentives. As soon as there's money in it, every conceivable attack to get that money has been tried. Which also mimics what happens in market economies: once there is money in it, every conceivable industry springs up, even things that are absurd or harmful. And money appears to be more powerful than things like laws or governments, in that things that are illegal but profitable happen, while things that are legal and unprofitable do not.
In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
I kind of get what you're saying, though I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up. This is true even for cryptocurrencies. If society collapses and I can't convert to some fiat currency, I don't think I'd trade a bitcoin for six slices of bread.
The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
> I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up.
You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage that spread to many other polities.
As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.
doesn't even have to be coins
Somalia operated on paper money valued at the cost of producing it
I don't know enough about Somalia (or what time period you're talking about) to necessarily refute this argument, but I'd examine the definition of "operate" here before accepting this as a proven system.
The East India Company was itself a highly effective quasi-governmental institution with a powerful military, a special relationship to a great power, and many other relationships to various kings and nobles who ran the local governments. It's not the best example for this type of phenomenon for this reason.
I think it's also the case that hard money is a different kind of phenomenon from paper money reflecting an entirely different philosophy concerning property and what it is. It reflects a natural law perspective in its most earthy and primitive form, which is that gold and silver are money because ancestors from time immemorial saw it as such due to certain intrinsic characteristics. Governments certainly regulated mints, but also marketplaces could and did regulate coinage on their own which is possible because of its physical nature. If a coin is clipped or made into a false alloy, that can be detected and corrected without state institutions.
Paper money by contrast tends to reflect more modern positivist theories of property in which property rights are deemed to exist because the state speaks those rights into existence. In the middle ages and even before, states as we know them now did not exist and could not exist, so positivism would have been absurd on its face, and its most direct application in the form of artificial currency could not be made.
> The East India Company was itself a highly effective quasi-governmental institution with a powerful military, a special relationship to a great power, and many other relationships to various kings and nobles who ran the local governments. It's not the best example for this type of phenomenon for this reason.
The EIC's first mint was operational in 1643, long before it became a quasi-state. It started to become a quasi-government more than a century later, when it started raising its first major army in the 1750s culminating in the Battle of Plassey and didn't really have the resources to fully become one until the diwani in 1765.
"Currency without government" can and has existed, though you could argue circularly that whatever can "issue" a currency is a government of a kind.
How something comes to be is distinct from how it is used.
A currency can arise from any fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile. In prisons cigarettes often fill that role; in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer groups it's often little baubles like shells. Government isn't necessary for this, but social contract is. You need to have enough faith that your neighbor will accept the currency to accept it yourself.
Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?
There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.
> A currency can arise from any fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile. In prisons cigarettes often fill that role; in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer groups it's often little baubles like shells. Government isn't necessary for this, but social contract is. You need to have enough faith that your neighbor will accept the currency to accept it yourself.
Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?
Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.
I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.
That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.
And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.
Currency is used for trade between multiple distrusting groups, credit is used for trade within a social group. There was an article recently on HN about the highland tribes of Papua New Guinea [1] and it described how the natives would trade amongst tribes using shells.
You actually see this on a small scale today in the functioning of many small communities, eg. you don't actually exchange currency to pay the host of a party, but you are expected to reciprocate and host sometimes yourself if you want to keep getting invited. There's a surprisingly large amount of these unpaid micro-transactions that happen, eg. my wife has gotten free childcare, free advice, free (used) furniture, free baby clothes, etc, all in the heart of Silicon Valley, because she reciprocates and also gives away her old furniture, baby toys, baby clothes, advice, introductions, childcare, etc. But when we have to pay the contractor for work on our house, we need dollars. When we buy a computer, we need dollars. When we buy all those goods that we give away new, we need dollars. That again reinforces the "credit is for people you know, currency is for people you don't" distinction.
Barter is used when a previous currency system collapses. The currency is no longer guaranteed to be accepted, so people want hard goods that they know they can use. But barter is an unstable equilibrium: as you mentioned, currency is just barter where one particular good becomes so widely accepted that people will take it not because they want it, but because it can be traded for other things that they want. There are reports of the Bosnian War [2] that described how alcohol and ammo quickly became pseudo-currencies because they were universally accepted and could easily be traded for what you actually needed.
Graeber isn't wrong, but as an anthropologist he over-indexes on the within-group interactions. There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708431
[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/664716931/How-I-survived-a-y...
Hmm... do you not have a credit card? I often reflect on how paying with dollars seems so disadvantaged in today's economy. If you plan to pay back on time, why would you ever use dollars?
I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.
I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.
I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?
Where would that leave us?
We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.
> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
Well I mean technically they are always for credit purposes, even if they are the "default/convenient payment method"? That's part of the advantage, but it's still credit. You get to spend and pay later. It wouldn't be a very good evaluation for credit purposes if it didn't work like credit? Or am I misunderstanding you?
It's just to say that "credit" isn't just about an in vs out group anymore than debt is. Or anymore than "currency" is? I'm not sure how the distinction you make helps clarify that question. The point is why would credit be for people you know, and currency for people you don't? Isn't credit just a particular agreement around said currency?
Let's compare two scenarios:
1. I live in a village. I buy flour on credit from the miller, because I lack funds and they know I'll be able to pay them back after I sell my own textile goods at market.
2. I travel overseas to a store I've never seen before and I will never see again. I transact $100 on my credit-card purely because my debit card won't work for some reason. I leave with the goods, reminding myself to pay off the balance ASAP with funds I already possess when I get back to the hotel and a laptop.
Technically they both involve "credit", but it's not really equivalent. The first case involves a direct relationship in a community, while the second is indirect, a stranger trusting my card-company. In the first, incurring a debt is an intended feature, in the second the temporary debt is just a weird inconvenient quirk that I'd rather skip entirely because it makes more work for me.
In short, just because someone uses a credit card doesn't necessarily mean it's "credit" in the anthropological sense.
I mean fair enough but we were already talking about credit cards, not villagers.
You said (emphasis added):
> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
So it wasn't about "credit" in the anthropological sense, as credit cards are never used in such a way. Unless you are going to suggest there is some bifurcated way of using credit cards where one offers a more "direct relationship to my community". In short, my misread wasn't as you indicated - about failing to misunderstand something about credit cards. Rather it was conflating a general sense of "credit" (such as credit cards) with what they had meant, "I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts." - which is what you term the "anthropological sense".
So I appreciate the nudge in the right direction, but I hope you see my point given what you actually conveyed. Thanks, have a good day!
In the context of the current discussion (minus the part that's accidentally derailing it by focusing too much on other meanings of the term credit), credit card vs debit card is not relevant at all: they are both denominated in currency, so they are currency. This is not a discussion about cash vs electronic.
Currency vs credit, as it was used some posts up is more like quantifiable vs not quantifiable. It's not about the exact catering expenses of parties thrown ("they had champagne, we have to invite them twice!") it's about inviting or not inviting. Not about the number of hours taking over the children, it's about being there when needed.
I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts. They're connected, but the former is more general.
I do think that the development of currency is intimately connected with the development of government. The core problem government solves is dispute resolution, and I would bet that the majority of disputes come from transaction where one side does not hold up their end of the bargain. In small communities you just have the tribal elders adjudicate, but as you start doing more currency transactions between mutually-distrusting groups that can't agree on their authority figures, you need a system in place for dispute resolution. Cue states.
My point is simply that currency comes first. State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation. To my knowledge this is historically accurate, and there are a lot of examples of currency spontaneously arising without a state to back it.
Hell, cryptocurrency itself is a good example. We now have a viable transnational, trustless, instantaneous currency. We do not have a viable transnational trustless dispute resolution process. And we very much feel the lack, because crime and fraud is rampant in cryptocurrency transactions. Currency creates the problem that government solves. Creating a government that can go along with cryptocurrency is an unsolved exercise left to the reader.
It's interesting, your point makes sense with the caveat of a blurring of terms.
I mean in the sense of, state formation was of such significance that I don't think you can say something like "currency came first" as if currency prior and post state formation is the same thing. It feels like the same sort of "pseudo-currency" with "currency" equivocation.
So if your model is - basic credit in that communal reciprocative sense, then you start trading with more distant outgroups, for this credit doesn't work, so everyone agrees on a currency, someone off in the distance doesn't agree, then states form to adjudicate disputes.
Then it is sensible as a primitive model, but I would just merely suggest that in the same way trying to say currency comes first is kind of a blurring the meaning of currency perhaps to the point of being a stretch, I think in this case to, it will be less orderly. One way this is blurred almost intrinsically in your articulation is via the term dispute resolution process. This could mean anything. It occurs to me that outright conquest and banditry is one way to resolve a dispute. Perhaps in places were there was "spontaneous" centering around a particular currency, this sort of violence was a predicate. I tend to think the need for violence and domination (and mitigations against the same) - what I think of when I think of states "resolving disputes" - was baked into the germ of humanity much earlier than what we might term "state formation". This gets back to the "pseudo-government" point I was trying to make earlier. I think of these things in parallel, rather than in sequence. If at their core humans are violent, such that they make violence, fear violence, and seek tradeoffs to manage violence, then this violence is a driver across currencies and states and trade networks, regardless of a determination of which "came first", if such a determination is even meaningful without greater specificity.
Similarly, I'm not sure if "State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation" is accurate in the same way. I suppose we have to unblur what "state" means.
I thank you for the back and forth though, which I enjoyed. I feel a need to do more reading on this topic, though I would guess much of these questions are not really falsifiable, as some of the answers are surely lost to history. Thanks, have a good day!
>>> Currency creates the problem that government solves.
Thank you - brilliant
I've heard many arguments that barter came before currency, if I'm not mistaken that was even one of Adam Smith's tropes in his writings that influenced currencies and economies we have today.
I don't necessarily buy the idea that someone with a chicken and needed bread wandered around looking for a baker in need of chicken, but their argument does fly in the face of the idea that barter follows failed currencies.
If nothing else you have a chicken and egg problem to unwind there, and barter does seem a bit more basic or simple than currency so I'd have guessed it came first.
It's less "I have bread and want a chicken" and more "I'm mostly self-sufficient by necessity, and provide what I need, but I have extra bread this week and Bob over there has a chicken ..."
You can watch both barter and currency develop in groups of children almost spontaneously.
There's a book Debt: The First 5000 Years (by the David Graeber that parent commenter references several times) that observes that there’s no documented case of a society that ran mainly on barter and then invented money to escape it. The "barter first, then money" story is mostly a thought experiment. I'm not in a position to confirm or refute this based on my own knowledge or to do the research to develop that knowledge, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously challenging Graeber on this point.
IIRC, Graeber suggests that debt comes first. Initially it is tracked by memory, then when that gets too complicated, some kind of item is chosen to represent debt, which then in some cases evolves into currency. I believe this process has been observed.
Sea shells were traded across the North American continent. I don’t know if they were currency, but they were found 1000 miles from the shore.
The point is that they weren’t just used within a single group where everyone had access to more for the cost of only labor.
While your assumptions about barter societies are pretty much true, I think you're off on the origins of currency being tied to force. This is overly influenced by modern fiat currencies whose values are derived from government requirements rather than valuable assets. There was a long period of time where precious metals and other valuable items were used as stores of value without a central authority requiring their use. People used official coinage because its weight and purity was standardized and it made things easier, and the value changed alongside debasement, often in spite of official attempts to prevent this. People also used different currencies alongside each other based on their weights and purities. The only times in ancient societies where we have something similar to what you're describing where a specific currency must be used is in taxation, and even then, most taxes were settled in equivalent values of other goods and not specific currencies. The only example I can think of for what you're describing is the Jewish temple offering system in the second temple period, in which certain obligations to the Temple were ruled to have to be paid in Tyrian sheckles specificall
But what do you mean? We have multiple currencies today? Each one is still based on force within its jurisdiction. Yes people try to get around the law. That doesn't change the nature of force. People speed all the time. This is not evidence that the government does not have authority over the interstates, rooted in force.
Sure it's evolved, but I don't see anything in your comment that really disputes the tie to force. Of course, taxation is connected to force. Additionally, as I addressed in another comment, a lack of modern "central authority" does not mean a lack of connection to "force" or violence. People can come up with distributed or atomized versions, which nevertheless arise under a similar tradeoff with respect to the fear of violence.
Does pricing things in euros mean dollars aren't a currency? Are dollars just one of many interchangable barter units?
In some prisons, it's fish packets from the commissary.
https://fee.org/articles/how-a-fish-became-prison-currency/
I am sorry to burst your "bubble", as it were, but cryptocurrencies are not, in fact, currencies.
Speaking in terms of U.S. regulation and legislation, crypto is variously regulated as a "commodity" or as a "security" and therefore, cannot be formally considered a currency. The name, "cryptocurrency" is a marketing ploy, which cleverly seeks to dilute the meaning of the term, which is a term of art, and is still reserved, in legal circles, for things which are, in fact, currencies, and function as currencies, and are regulated as currencies, which crypto… is not.
It was rather painful to me in particular, because a few weeks ago, I registered and attended a municipal education session on fraud. And this session was co-hosted by an actual representative of the Arizona Corporation Commission - Securities Division. I can prove that because my prize for the session was an authentic, imprinted, ACC/SD pizza slicer! Anyway, as soon as she mentioned crypto and asserted it is a class of "currency" I tried to call her out, and I asked more than once, and being reluctant to turn the session into a referendum on her legal knowledge, I finally let her win. It was embarrassing.
Anyway, no, cryptocurrency has never been a currency. Not in the USA. Other nations may deem it as such, but I kind of doubt it so far. Please do not conflate real currency with crypto. They are distinct things that are easily distinguished. The consumer should not be deluded into thinking otherwise.
The human race is going to be really bummed to learn that currency didn't exist before the advent of US regulation and legislation! We were doing it wrong this whole time!!
I think the key to making a pocket-switched protocol that did currency-like things is the CALM theorem.
It's pretty restrictive. You couldn't just port bitcoin to a CRDT while keeping CALM. You'd have to rethink the economics around the constraints of what's possible to do in a distributed way. But maybe that would be worth doing anyway.
Blockchain consensus rules are isomorphic to governments and your selection of a chain is basically voting. Cryptocurrency isn't independent of governments - it's just invented its own kind.
> It speaks a lot to the power of financial incentives
Also, to the power of modern-day cryptography that rubber-hose and evil maid (backdoors) are the only viable (even if expensive) alternatives.
> the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts
Both of which require "governance", but post-collapse, it may be of form that may not benefit the collective.
It doesn't demonstrate the security of cryptography, just that entities exist with sufficient skill and knowledge for supply chain attacks but lacking cryptographically relevant mathematics.
It doesn't prove the hardness assumption, if it did we could trot forward any toddler and ask if it knows the factors to some RSA product, and "prove" hardness assumption for factoring integers...
Sir Terry predicted this, in his C. M. O. T. Dibbler character[0].
I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.
[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cut-Me-Own-Throat_Dibbler
The two most important fundamentals are agreements (contracts) and the ability to enforce them (that is, to seek redress) - as in: law enforcement.
A high trust society. Everything else is downstream of that.
>that things that are illegal but profitable happen, while things that are legal and unprofitable do not.
I'm not sure. I want to say there's volunteering, charities, clubs, religions etc. But those all need resources (time, energy, money) put into them to remain viable. I suppose if something is unprofitable it means the resources (money or not) are drained faster than they go in, and the entity dissolves.
Money is a contract, so I guess its just contracts all the way down.
After the Hezbullah pagers incident, the basic assumption has to be that every possible supply chain attack you can think of is realistic.
And yet, you could point that out to lots of people that place hardware in extremely sensitive locations and they most likely won't believe you because to do so would require a lot of prepwork. And right next door sits a few hundred million worth of gear...
I consider my phone compromised and will not do banking on it at all. The rest of the world is living in blissful ignorance that will burn them some day.
They are liable to the consumer but they can get their money back from their supplier in turn. As long as you only sell stuff sold to you by someone reputable you can get money from, it should be mostly fine.
Please explain the process for reimbursing stolen money from a vendor which will disavow any responsibility as soon as they're on the hook for *illions.
Why don't we see more theft using banking apps on compromised phones in highly developed countries? Also, if you online banking, what platform is safe enough for you?
There's tons of it, it's just not reported on very well. For corporate it just becomes an insurance matter
It’s always been said that if Mossad is your adversary you are already fucked. But for a some crypto thieves to operate at this level this early is a bit surprising to me. If you had asked me last year to predict when this would happen I probably would have given this year significantly less than 50% probability.
I think you're vastly underestimating the sophistication of players that target this scale of theft when you make it easy by using an infrastructure designed to be preyed upon.
Banking systems exist such as they do with the regulations that they do for a reason.
Buying your hardware wallet from random 3rd party no-name distributors in China is kinda asking for trouble, isn't it?
Likewise from a big coorp US or Swiss company.
The difference is that the western attackers go free, whilst the Chinese attackers will very likely be executed.
I’m referring more to the sophistication of the attack.
I thought it was Israel who did the pager bomb attack, not Hezbollah?
Israeli attack on Hezbollah.
I bought my first ledger hardware wallet circa 2017 (If I recall correctly). At the time, they shipped it without any anti-tamper packaging, and even had a note bragging about how it didn't matter, because of how their devices were set up. I forget the exact wording, and would be interested if anyone here has it. Anyways, at the time I was doing hardware hacking for 3-letter agencies, and decided to not use ledger devices when I saw they weren't too concerned with their supply chain.
I bought directly from ledger. I don't know if they were assembling devices in house at the time or not.
Edit: further context, this discussion is somewhat relevant to how confident they were. See the OP's remark about what ledger said: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ssycjn/my_l...
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
I think it's good to remember this is always the case. Attacks on tamper evident seals are commonly called "theoretical" or "lacking value" in practical terms, but recent customs evasion using counterfeit seals in the US shows that to be untrue.
Heck, The Wire had an arc about people bypassing customs tamper-seal tags.
This is a big part of my problem with crypto and why I'm bearish on it breaking through to normies. Traditional financial institutions just seem so much safer all in all, not to mention having far better UX.
The big thing traditional institutions give you is logs of everything. Sure if I get your account number I can take all your money - but there are traces of that and so it is easy to arrest me after the fact.
Don't give out your account numbers, there will be a lot of hassle should an evil person get it. However you have a reasonable change of getting your money back in a couple years. (this is also why you get warning about some countries - a few will not cooperate with traces and so the money is lost)
There's also the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (in the US).
FDIC is great but it really only protects against bank insolvency. It doesn't come into play if money is fraudulently transferred out of your account.
> Don't give out your account numbers
Is that a US thing? In Europe, companies have their account numbers on their letter heads and websites, and people are quite comfortable giving out their account numbers.
https://www.quelle.de/service-hilfe/bezahlung-finanzierung/k...
That's strange because all you need for direct debit authorisation is the account number and name, and a PNG image of a physical signature.
That’s definitely not the case in Europe. There’s no way to start a debit operation out of my account other than:
1. Something electronic that kicks of the thing where I need to enter the “ID codes” from device or app; 2. Being present at the bank and having been ID’d;
There definitely is, that’s how SEPA direct debit works.
yeah. I am also unsure why we do not see more fraud here. Is it because of the 8 weeks of no questions asked refund possibility for payers and up to 13 months for unauthorized/fraudulent transactions? Or does the 5 business days lead time to get direct-debit play a role?
It is precisely because of the refund policy. It is so generous that, per my understanding, most SEPA direct debit fraud is abusing the refunds. Most banks do not require much supporting evidence for claiming the debit to be unauthorized, and unlike credit card disputes, the merchant doesn't even get to make a statement in the process.
In Japan, that authorisation needs to come together with an official certification, something that’s only valid for 3 months and you have to get it yourself from the local justice branch office.
Why don't we see more fraud using this technique?
So I can walk to a bank, speak to the teller, and withdraw from any account number by showing them that signature? I think not
Surely just knowing someone's account number can't be enough? Sweden's biggest bank uses your national identification number (equivalent to social security number) as your checking account number, and Sweden's national identification numbers are public information.
I don't know how it works in Sweden. Some accounts have more security. In the end if I know the right numbers (which may not be your national ID) I could drain your bank account - but I would be caught if I tried so even hardened criminals won't attempt it.
I think it also encourages us to rethink specialized and hardened advices versus general ones.
The same attack on every desktop and laptop would be... significantly harder.
I'd argue that if used properly that crypto is more secure than most banks.
argue it
So explain why the Winklevoss twins store their crypto secret words in bank vaults?
I'll give you a little hint - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
It can't be more secure if you have no recourse after you're hacked.
You can buy insurance. Like for a stolen car or burned house.
Do you? Someone actually sell backdoored crypto wallet insurance?
Here "if used properly" is lifting so heavy it can be used to move Mount Everest.
The traditional banks are not better than crypto for receiving and sending money, specially when it comes to international transactions.
The only thing they are better is providing security in an easier way.
Is Wise considered traditional or not? Also, Revolut? Those two come to mind when I think about easier/cheaper international transfers.
The reason why traditional works is the fraud can be reversed. If money is stolen from your accounts, as long as you are not the cause, in most cases the institution or govt will make you whole.
It is reinvented by 'crypto' in the form of 'subjectivity' (as opposed to the hard objectivity of 'your keys your coins' and the absolute acceptance of all objectively (though perhaps fraudulent or thieving) valid transactions.
One example of subjectivity is if, and this happens, a bug is found which can drastically increase the supply of coins beyond the intent of the creators; everyone comes together and removes those state transitions manually despite their objective validity. A more practical notion would be some type of "this transaction was fraud, someone has authority to reverse it." Of course, this is a hard tradeoff, but users should be able to make it.
> not to mention having far better UX
Yeah, it is totally great to have to set up a different account for every service, then having to do AML and KYC, and then having your account suspended for no apparent reason. So great that international transfers takes days and tens of dollars in fees, if they succeed at all. So great how a large part of the world‘s populace is denied access to the global financial system. Great as well how centralized it is, so things go down when there are technical problems at your bank. Absolutely awesome how Canada was able to freeze bank accounts of people who donated to the ”wrong“ cause.
They totally have it figured out, we should stop looking for alternatives. We already have the perfect system for the ages. Anybody who even tries is delusional.
It's not doing OCR on the screen, it's intercepting the pixel data that comes unencrypted over the SPI bus that connects the CPU to the display.
I always wonder to what degree these omissions are really accidents. There must be some fraction where 'the hacker did it' was baked in from day #1. Not saying that that is the case here but I've seen some pretty questionable stuff that is supposedly very secure (bank security tokens for instance), where there was ample space left in the devices and no anti-tamper measures beyond the case being glued shut. Some even have replaceable batteries for convenient access to the interior right behind the keyboard.
I remember seeing a TV program[1] where the UK govt had proposed some hare-brained key escrow thing (this is circa 2000 ish) and they had an expert on to discuss it. Well they didn’t mess around. The expert they had on to explain the drawbacks of the scheme was Whitfield Diffie[2] and he was up against some government contractor slug in a suit. Anyhow Diffie explained that there is essentially no security measure that is effective if you create a prize of infinite value. If the prize for circumventing security is great enough, it will be possible to use money to get around whatever security.
[1] “Newsnight” on BBC
[2] As in Diffie-Hellman etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie
> When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.
Every single time I thought maybe people on the internet know what they're talking about, I've been proven wrong. The internet is for entertainment purposes only.
The only educational exception has been people who weren't exactly posting on the internet, such as the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting videos or Stanford lectures.
There's a lot of grief can come from it, so I try and read this poem often. [0]
[0] https://gladdestthing.com/poems/ed
> people on the internet
This is not a homogenous mass...it also keeps changing. The internet is just a medium. It's like saying people writing books know what they talk about. Doesn't make sense. Anybody can write on the internet or write a book
That's true. What I really mean to say is, people with worthwhile things to say don't usually say them only on the internet, whereas people who didn't put any thought into what they are saying often do solely post their opinion on the internet, and that I prefer to look at higher effort output compared to internet posts as far as information is concerned. My point isn't about denouncing "people of the internet", but rather, the median quality of opinions on the internet. And the poem, of course, is about who is ultimately accountable.
I don't get hardware wallets that have you enter the key on another device. Or don't show the transaction on the hardware device's screen, with every destination and amount, with a button to confirm on the device. Or trusting a wallet to generate a random seed. Or not using the most entropy possible (e.g. 24-word seed). Anything less is dropping the ball.
? Ledger devices are exactly what you’re describing: the key stays on the device, you don’t enter it anywhere. Transactions are confirmed on the small screen + button on device and it displays sender and receiver of a tx.
The root cause of this attack is that the typical cryptocurrency wallet operational model involves the key leaving the device in plain text as part of the setup/backup process. Such a thing is impossible on any normal correctly configured HSM (while creating backups is possible by some sort of multi-step process where the secret key material never exists in plaintext outside the security boundary, how exactly that is done differs significantly between vendors).
Ledger devices generate a private key internally, and it never leaves the device's secure element chip. The malicious chip in this attack reads the display to get the 24 word recovery phrase shown during setup.
These Ledger hardware wallets are following the best security practices for hardware wallets and still got hacked.
The idea reminds me somehow of bank card ATM skimmers from old times like this one (2009): https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/heres-what-a-car...
This also speaks to Bitcoin's design weakness in the form of the distributed, authority-less blockchain: there is no authority that can undo or correct illegally made transactions. I know that this is used as a selling point for crypto coins, but I would argue that it is the central enabler behind these conplex technical attacks because it shifts the economy far into the attacker's favor.
> there is no authority that can undo or correct illegally made transactions
That is the only way to ensure no "authority" can undo or correct legally made transactions.
If you really don't want to trust digitally generated seed phrases or digital wallets in general, and that seems reasonable to me, just roll some dice or flip coins.
Its slow, but it will never have been tampered with and can't be digitally cracked if you have multiple physical copies of the resulting seed.
Apparently the world learned nothing from Israel's Pager Attack.
Would love to hear people's thoughts on this excerpt from the Epstein files in light of these disclosures:
--------------
From: Vincenzo lozzo
Sent: Monday, July 2, 2018 8:04 AM
To: jeevacation@gmail.com
Subject: Ledger wallet warning
Attachments: image1jpeg; Untitled attachment 00284.txt
In case you hold any coins in it, please don't spread this as they h=ven't released any of the information yet.
As for what is worth, the other wallets seem just as bad
--------------
Links:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02501...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02507...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA008603...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02505...
Lol at the thought of Steve Bannon speaking at DEFCON (last link).
2018? Irrelevant
Or at any rate, Ledger did have some vulnerabilities slightly before that month (and probably after) but it doesn't seem like an especially noteworthy connection.
I bought some bitcoin in 2017. Im using electrum, I'm terrified I'm going to get hacked. To the point where I don't even have electrum installed anywhere. I was thinking paper wallets are probably my best bet. I'm not sure what to do. And right now I don't have enough time to seriously investigate my options.
Perhaps it is possible that VisaNet is priced more fairly than it would seem at first glance?
I don't have to think about any of this stuff when I am using the payment terminal at Kroger. We have well engineered systems that eliminate the need for being constantly on edge about every monetary transaction. I can lose my entire actual wallet and experience ~zero financial impact, even if a malicious party obtains it.
Because card readers brick themselves if opened or tampered with. If Ledger designed their hardware the same, this attack would not be possible.
So we are going with an additional layer of complexity?
What happens if my wallet bricks itself due to some misconfiguration or environmental transient? I don't have to keep multiple redundant copies of my payment cards around just in case my physical wallet self destructs.
> No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).
It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.
It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.
It is far-fetched because it is an attack by thieves on consumers, not a state intelligence agency and intelligence targets. It's far-fetched for me to fly an B-2 bomber, but it's been commonplace for US government for decades.
Thieves and intelligence agencies can be one and the same, see North Korea... Crypto is especially useful for heavily sanctioned countries.
I don't own any crypto, but if I did, I'd probably choose to use a multisig setup with 2+ signers, including at least one (regularly pentested) software wallet.
It depends what you do with your coins. Hardware wallets are meant to be used for people that frequently trade and need to sign transactions.
I always thought it is stupid to HODL using a hardware wallet. For HODLing, just get a random computer (no mailorder) and run debian13 with electrum (it is in the official repo, not an external package hence protected by standard debian safeties). Once you generated you keys, back them up and either wipe the machine, or at least airgap it.
Extra bonus: Raspberry pi 5 runs debian 13 out of the box.
Lots of security relies on potential attackers being lazy and relatively 'sane'.
There are lots of security measures you can bypass if you pretend to be crazy within given bounds or simply stop acting sane.
Here I am using an iPhone app like I have been for a decade, feeling safer than ever. I'm really glad I didn't jump on the hardware wallet trend.
Not sure if your comment invalidates the context: your iPhone app (or hardware or iOS, etc) could have a bug that was not discovered yet. It's all about attack vectors, and opponent motivation and resources.
Even iPhone apps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x46gnh/a_fake_cry...
That app did not have nearly the effort put in, compared to the subject of this article.
That poster didn’t even prove the fake wallet app stole his bitcoin (in the sense required in a court of law). Presumably it wasn’t worth the effort because their money was gone and not coming back, but still.
It always depends how much money you got in the wallet. People in the crypto space go super paranoid, 2-of-3 signing schemes with top-notch security, hardware legers, metal-plated keys that are burried in the woods etc, and in the end they hold less than 1000$ in the wallet... All safety measures should be chosen relative to the amount you are actually securing.
How about a bank vault? 500 year old tech that is still safe.
How do you put bitcoin in a bank vault?
He’s saying put regular money in the bank vault, why complicate with crypto.
You create your seedphrase - the famous 12/24 words, print them on a piece of paper and put it in the bank vault. Ideally some sort of fireproof container/envelope around it, and if you plan on long-term storage rather write them down manually with long lasting ink pen.
You buy a little bit of titanium sheet and some alphanumeric punches and you punch your seed phrase into it. It won't matter if the bank burns down or gets flooded, your plates will be fine.
In many places, there are no safety deposit boxes (vaults) available to regular people anymore. In my country, there are zero options and the only recommendation is to put your valuables in a safe in your home (which has a completely different security model than a bank vault).
Can't believe people who went to the trouble of figuring out a hardware wallet are getting robbed just as badly as my naïve ass, who just held all my crypto at FTX
And at least you know who stole from you (SBF)
As I understand, they recovered quite a lot in the FTX bankruptcy. The guy running it now ( John J. Ray III ) is a bankruptcy legend. What was your recovery rate(%)?
Agree on your comments about amateur hour.
I've worked in payment terminal hardware security and this is not surprising to me at all.
This attack on the Ledger wallets would definitely rate as amateur in terms of sophistication in that world.
Got worried there for a second about the mokka pot I got through Amazon instead of Bialetti.
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
It's predictable: The ROI of attacking cryptocurrencies in this manner is high enough to make expensive attacks worthwhile. It doesn't make other expensive attacks on typical end-users worthwhile, and they remain far-fetched.
Ah, but typical end-users is only one class of targets, industry is another and there the pay-off can be substantial.
"that's been described" is the important part of that statement
Bitcoin rich people generally did nothing legitimate to earn their wealth and are often straight up devious criminals, so hearing this story about them being robbed is just a rare instance of karmic justice, IMO.
This is the argument that scammers and ransomware gangs use: we (the criminals) live in a poor country, and you, the rich white people, enjoy all the benefits. Nothing happens if you lose some of your savings, especially if it's a business and not some granny.
Sure, but I don't rob anyone at all, regardless of how awful they are, and I have definitely been the victim of grift, because I pay taxes in the US.
Post it note in a drawer somewhere baby
> So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Back in the day, RSA SecurID hardware tokens were completely physically sealed, with no room for a backdoor. Tampering with them in any ways destroys them or makes it physically obvious. That's a physically secure design. This Ledger thing looks more like a consumer toy.
Not to contradict your point, but in 2011 RSA's SecurID backend servers were hacked. TOTPs require shared secrets, and their server had all the secrets to the SecurID keyfobs they managed. Security is hard.
Yep that was a flawed design. Modern ones (ex. Token2 Programmable) are identical but allow burning your own seed, while tampering destroys it.
Was that a nation state-level attack?
RSA and the government were extremely tight lipped about it, including refusing to confirm what data had been exfiltrated. At the time news stories recited that some evidence pointed to the PRC. There may have been some followup after media attention moved on.
I'd be curious if anyone on HN could confirm whether RSA quietly reissued new keyfobs. The safe assumption was the intruders got access to the TOTP secrets, but strictly speaking that was conjecture, unless that was later confirmed directly or indirectly.
This may have been a different incident, but at some point there was chatter about a possible physical intrusion targeting a TOTP backend server for DoD or defense contract systems (Lockheed Martin?).
I think really serious incidents tend to be more vigorously suppressed, unlike humdrum PII exfiltration, for the same reason that during wartime states don't want the enemy to have unequivocal confirmation about how successful an operation was, e.g. whether the secrets exfiltrated included credentials to specific systems.
I briefly tried to keep a list of these types of hardware-based authentication systems hacks. But it's a chore, especially following up.
Anything about RSA SecurID hardware tokens always makes think about the guy who used a web cam and OCR to read token LCD screen.
https://smallhacks.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/reading-codes-fr...
> or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
This reminds me of the 2020 case where a union organizer thought there was a spy camera inside a utility pole outside his house. It was in a conspiracy subreddit, so it seemed like the deranged ramblings of a ravingly-paranoid stranger. But they found the addresses of the IP cams and had plenty of evidence to corroborate it.
Now, Flock cameras are just normal.
I think the 2020s will be defined by this trend. "Things which only existed in the minds of a paranoid person" becoming normal parts of daily life.
Most large cities in the world have had thousands of public CCTV cameras for decades. Traffic enforcement cameras have been super normal for even longer.
I am not talking about those. These cameras were targeted and pointing directly into peoples windows, set up by the local police department, under the guise of being electric utility boxes.
Here are two sources on the matter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/gin79z/...
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/activists-find-camera-insi...
In August 2020, this was unbelievable, and it would have been considered reasonable (if wrong) to dismiss OP as paranoid, especially for the subreddit they posted in.
Exactly, inspiration.
> You're not anywhere near paranoid enough
I refuse to touch anything crypto with a ten-foot pole. I don't know if that makes me "paranoid", but it is certainly very easy. Just stay away from the thing doing drug markets, scams and rugpulls every month.
The US dollar would like a word
Fair. I didn't include the word primarily in my sentence. Please assume it is included now.
> For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands
What about ignoring proprietary hardware wallets, and implement your 'wallet' as a small, bare-bones, self installed debian system with enough empty disk space to be a full node, that stores the data on a dm-crypt volume? Buy the hardware in cash from a random used computer store. No it won't be as convenient and portable. But if you trust standards-based crypto, you can implement your own ssh tunnel or whatever to it from your other client devices. This also lets you take 1:1 disk clone images of the dm-crypt volume and safely back it up to remote locations at any time you want.
what kind of hardware would you buy to have a reasonable chance at being usable in 15 or 20 years?
> We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Nit: did it actually do OCR? Given the implant was embedded in a specific known device that probably used specifically known fonts, you'd think they could just do a lookup a character's block of pixels to read the screen.
after you entered your seed into the device.
ewww
> this is incredible stuff...
Is it? The theory and even the implementation is literally a gas station credit card skimmer for crypto. I do agree that anyone dismissing attacks on Ledger was foolish, but mostly because Ledger is an obviously low-quality product on even a cursory inspection, not because we need to become even more paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Multiple crypto-experts said that the safest crypto wallet is a recent iPhone in airplane mode which is only used for this purpose. Because it's much harder to implant that your average hardware crypto wallet.
Why is it harder to implant?
I'm going to guess it's a number's game, you might be able to do it with an iPhone but it's not guaranteed to go to a crypto user, whereas the other one is a bespoke system for the purpose.
I presume because iPhones have a secure TPM and nobody is targeting them for crypto supply chain attacks.
The hardware is much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and high-speed, and the supply chain is much more generic; a Ledger is a really primitive piece of hardware with a simple display interface and a ton of empty space inside it. An iPhone has no wasted space and extremely high-speed onboard buses that would be hard to sniff. Additionally, with Ledger, you know that every customer is going to be using the device to access crypto, so it's an easy target nearer the head of the supply chain. With an iPhone, you have no idea what end-user to target the implant against.
You can walk in to an official Apple store and buy an iphone direct almost anywhere in the world. Crypto thieves would have to have compromised the entirety of Apple's supply chain and found space inside the iphone to fit a whole spy chip (of which there is basically none).
Or just a single apple store sales employee...
right, so you'd have to know the store with your victims upfront, know which ones to give these highly expensive implanted iPhones to (or have a lot of units), be able to always bring enough for the specific colors the customers want....
I'm especially amused at all the different iPhone SKUs you'd have to stock your crooked phone salesman with. 4 storage tiers, Pro and Pro Max, and 4 colors. So that's 32 boxed phones, a good-sized duffel bag full, to smuggle into the Apple Store, to keep on-hand but avoid anyone finding them, in anticipation of the victim's visit, just to cover the Pro range. Imagine you spent $75,000 on those phones and about as much on the technicians' time to open them all up, install the implants, and perfectly re-seal them. Your salesman has successfully kept the phones hidden for a month, and the target walks into that store and says "You know, I really like the color the non-pro model has this year."
On the other hand, the attack surface of an iPhone is huge compared to a dedicated hardware wallet, and it's hard to keep it in airplane mode and actually transact your coins.
You can use QR codes or USB sticks to sign offline transactions, same as with a hardware wallet.
"crypto-experts"
How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet? There should be plenty folks here who would be capable of doing so. (Doesn't even have to be the most hardened and audited implementation ever since you won't release this to anybody.) This makes you vulnerable to purely very targetted attacks.
As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.
Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.
There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.
> How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet?
Also known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.
Yeah, the problem with "crypto hardware wallets" is the same as the problem with "secure phones for drug dealers" - they are an extremely juicy targets, you KNOW that any user of them is your target.
> Also known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.
4G chips cost nothing and can be super small.
that's why i only power it once inside my faraday cage closet
How about a recent Pixel with GrapheneOS, again kept in airplane mode and only used for this purpose? Using QR codes for transaction signing.
This is why I sold my bitcoin early - all those years of reading Phrack. Sure, it was $300 at the time and I could have made more, but I had no idea how to securely _store_ it. Still don't.
You are king sensible. Well done. Just $90,000 per BTC worse off ha ha.
I had 3 whole bitcoin. Lol.
I remember chatting with about AI a few months ago about the issue of foreign RAM sticks being able to cooperate with websites to serve different files/instructions, undetectably. Scary stuff.
Are you sure whatever the LLM said was actually credible though?
Absolutely not… but maybe the LLM was trying to tell them it’s a crazy idea and they are only reporting that a conversation occurred.
Why would I assume it would be credible? Instead, I simply proposed some designs and had it find out if such hardware existed / was feasible.