Disciple of Satoshi

Reborn as 'Chela' (disciple) of Guru Satoshi Nakamoto.
#nostr pubkey
f43a1f9599fdb4db9d3269260d835367d426221962b523c4d4680f9952e89201

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

A 23-year-old PhD student at UC Berkeley sued the United States government in 1995 for the right to publish his own mathematics. The case took five years. He won. The ruling declared that software was protected speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

That ruling is the reason every encrypted message you have ever sent exists. Without it, the cryptographic code that runs WhatsApp, Signal, every HTTPS connection, every banking app, and every encrypted hard drive on Earth would still be classified as a munition under US export law.

His name is Daniel J. Bernstein. Most cryptographers call him djb.

Here is the story, because the mathematician who personally rewrote the legal foundation of digital privacy works quietly out of a university office in Chicago.

Bernstein was born on October 29, 1971 in East Patchogue, New York. He attended Bellport High School on Long Island and graduated at 15 in 1987. The same year, at 15, he placed 5th in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. At 16 he placed Top 10 in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from New York University in 1991. He earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995, under Hendrik Lenstra, one of the most influential number theorists of the era.

In 1995, while still a graduate student, he wrote a cryptographic algorithm called Snuffle. He wanted to publish it. He wanted to share it on the internet. He wanted to teach his students about it. The US government told him he could not.

Encryption software, under US law at the time, was classified as a "munition" under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Publishing it outside the country was treated the same as exporting weapons-grade uranium. The government's position was that Bernstein needed an export license to share his own mathematics, that he had to register as an arms dealer, and that he had to submit every paper for government review before publication.

He sued.

Bernstein v. United States ran from 1995 to 2003. The Electronic Frontier Foundation represented him at first. He eventually argued portions of his own case himself, despite having no legal training. Three separate federal court rulings established, for the first time in American history, that source code was a form of expressive speech protected by the First Amendment. The export controls on cryptographic software collapsed.

The case is the legal foundation of every encrypted communication system built in the United States in the last quarter century. Without it, the cryptography that secures the modern internet would still be technically illegal to publish outside US borders.

He then spent the next two decades writing the actual cryptography that the world ended up using.

In 1995 he released qmail, a secure mail transfer agent designed to replace sendmail, which had been the source of decades of security vulnerabilities. He offered a $500 reward for anyone who could find a security vulnerability in qmail. Nobody collected the reward for over a decade. qmail is still in production use today.

In 2000 he released djbdns, a DNS server suite designed to replace BIND, the standard DNS implementation, which had also been the source of widespread vulnerabilities. He offered the same $500 reward. Nobody collected it for years.

In 2005 he released Salsa20, a stream cipher. In 2008 he released ChaCha20, a refinement of Salsa20 that is now used inside Google Chrome, Cloudflare, OpenSSH, WireGuard, and the TLS 1.3 standard. Roughly half of all encrypted internet traffic today flows through ChaCha20.

In 2005 he released Curve25519, an elliptic curve designed for high-speed Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It is now the default key exchange algorithm in Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Tor, OpenSSH, and most modern VPN protocols. Every time two devices establish an encrypted connection on Earth today, there is a roughly even chance Curve25519 is the math underneath.

In 2011 he released Poly1305, a message authenticator. The combination of ChaCha20 and Poly1305 is now the second most common authenticated encryption scheme on the internet, second only to AES-GCM.

In 2011 he co-authored Ed25519, a signature scheme based on Curve25519. It is now standard in OpenSSH, the Tor protocol, and the cryptocurrency space.

He is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago. He holds a parallel position at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. His personal website at https://t.co/4Ls9QW8e3w is a flat list of papers, software, and court documents. It has no styling. It has no marketing copy. He has been maintaining it personally since 1995.

In 2023 he sued the US government again. This time the dispute was with the National Institute of Standards and Technology over what he alleged was insufficient transparency in the post-quantum cryptography standardization process. The case is still pending.

A mathematician from Long Island sued his own government for the right to publish his own work, won, and then spent the next 30 years quietly writing the cryptography that now protects roughly half the encrypted internet.

He is still publishing.

He is still suing when he needs to.

He still answers questions on the public mailing lists.

[BelannF @BelannF]

WONDER IF GOOGLE IS LYING TO US - HERE IS A MAN - DOUG SEVEY - WHO SAYS DATA CENTERS DON'T NEED TO USE WATER - He is an expert from Paleo, Iowa - has built data centers - and is currently running a data center.

Maybe Google and others need to hire him as a consultant.

The Data Centers can operate without water, but the alternative is expensive - The Billionaires just don't want to spend the money I guess.

What say you?

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Digital Credit. Digital Money. Digital Equity. Digital Treasury.

My conversation with @ColeMacro at @BTCPrague on the future of capital markets, followed by Q&A on the nuances of Bitcoin-backed securities and corporate finance.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the President of MileagePlus at United Airlines.

You read the confession of the man downstairs — the one who unbundled the seat. He sells the airplane. I run the thing the airplane is for.

In 2020 we borrowed $6.8 billion against my program. The appraisers valued it at $22 billion. The entire airline — every plane, every gate, every pilot — was worth $13 billion. My division owns no aircraft and is worth nine billion dollars more than the company that contains it.

57% of all miles were never earned on an airplane. A bank prints them. I sell them to the bank for cash, then decide what they're worth on the day you try to spend them.

In 2019 I deleted the award chart. A currency with no published exchange rate. On April 2 I cut your earn rate from 5 to 3. The next day, my colleague announced his seat fees, and every reporter called him, and not one of them called me.

He charges you for this trip. I devalue every trip you were saving for.

The full confession.

https://t.co/YYgkLbuhiO

[Parker Lewis @parkeralewis]

You are contorting words and definitions to rationalize your own economic incentive, falsely suggesting there is not objectivity (merely different frames) and you have a misunderstanding about volatility. Bitcoin is volatile because it is in the process of being adopted as a new form of money. Every new adopter is pricing bitcoin for the first time, with limited information. The volatility you are trying to engineer around is circular in its logic.

The only path to stability is through mass adoption, which necessitates volatility (new adopters pricing it for the first time). Bitcoin will not be volatile when incremental adoption can only represent a fraction rather than a multiple or order of magnitude.

Rather than helping people understand bitcoin, your solution is to get them into a bitcoin derivative product that you're selling as not volatile but it will be in any event of market stress, maybe less so than bitcoin but still volatile because it is expressly and inextricably linked to bitcoin and bitcoin adoption. When the bitcoin price goes down significantly, there will always be an incentive to sell your preferred and buy bitcoin because the market interest rate of bitcoin has reset higher when it declines.

And related to that is why there's no real long term holder basis for the preferreds (it's a temporary holding pen for everyone) but it does create a permanent capital base for your corporation, if you can sell it.

Rather than help people understand bitcoin and manage volatility very logically with an allocation to bitcoin that mutes its volatility, you want people to buy your corporation's stock. And the piece about bitcoin payments is a misnomer. It's a spend vs. save dilemma and spending bitcoin is downstream from someone first coming to understand why bitcoin stores value.

But you do not have an incentive in that because you're just trying to justify people buying your corporate stock rather than bitcoin. I'd encourage you to be introspective and to read this piece on volatility to reconsider your rationalization.
https://t.co/xUWtPxC36u

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Republicans are in charge because we promised:

to Make America Healthy Again.
to start No New Wars,
to put people above corporations,
to put America above foreign countries,
to release the Epstein files,
to not spy on citizens,
to eliminate fraud,

what the hell happened?!

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine.

In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted.

https://t.co/pLMD0krc69

[lauren emily @leamuirleyn]

Unfortunately @Keonne has been moved to the Oklahoma federal transfer center, and we have no idea how long he’ll be held in limbo there. He is without a mattress, forced to endure lights on 24/7, and housed alongside mixed security levels with no proper separation.

The Bureau of Prisons is supposed to uphold humane treatment standards for all inmates, even those just passing through. Basic dignity like a bed, restful darkness, and safe classification shouldn’t be optional. Why are these minimum conditions being disregarded?

@BOPDirector @OfficialFBOP @BOPDepDirector @AlephInstitute @PrisonPolicy @MichaelGSantos

[Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 @mtgreenee]

READ THIS CAREFULLY. 👇

The people who fought to release the Epstein files have been targeted harder than the people who fought against the America First movement.

Why?

For years, Americans were promised accountability.

❌ No accountability for the Democrats on the January 6th Committee.
❌ No one has been prosecuted from the stolen election in 2020.
❌ No accountability for COVID-era crimes against humanity.

Instead, the loudest attacks have been directed at 4 Republicans who demanded the release of the Epstein Files.

That should concern every American, regardless of right vs left.

Americans were promised transparency and accountability. The question is: Where is it?

Actions speak louder than broken promises.

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑𝚞𝚊 𝙱𝚒𝚍𝚍𝚕𝚎 @joshua__b]

The 19 Republicans holding the line on the Fourth Amendment are doing the right thing. But the problem is bigger than FISA.

I will thank them when they hold the Intelligence Community accountable for using the exact same "national security" justification to suppress 70 years of energy advancement to protect an energy monopoly.

The IC does not just collect data without warrants. They suppress breakthrough physics. Under the Invention Secrecy Act (35 U.S.C. § 181), there are currently over 6,500 patents under active secrecy orders. When the Navy patents an inertial mass reduction device (US20170313446A1), but the public is told we still need to burn fossil fuels, "national security" is just a cover for monopoly protection.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

@SpeakerJohnson 19 Republicans withheld our votes in order to preserve Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

By refusing to honor the Fourth Amendment, you’re jeopardizing the continuation of FISA.

Include a WARRANT requirement for US citizens if you want Republicans to pass this bill.

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This really worries me

A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood

But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one

I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x

One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency

Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home

He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E

He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor

As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit

If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't

I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system

This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal

My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption

A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus

It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad

Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention

Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do

https://t.co/RMi7L44fUy

[Luiz M.D. @Luizmd]

Polio hoax explained in 3 minutes.

[Kacee Allen @KaceeRAllen]

USS Liberty Survivor Exposes that they were THREATENED with life in prison if they ever spoke up about the incident.

[Col Ajai Sharma, VSM (Retd), SIKH REGT @sherajai]

A Dalit farming family from Anjar, Kutch, Gujarat alleged dat after selling land, they were tricked into buying electoral bonds worth about ₹11 crore as if it were an investment scheme. SBI/ECI data reportedly showed 10 crore was encashed by BJP n ₹1 crore by Shiv Sena.

[Disciple of Satoshi @SatoshiChela]

@markgoodw_in Do you not agree that someone (one person or one corporation or one nation) accumulates 90% is a failure of bitcoin ?

But it's no where near the same issue with single digit (honestly, I can't clearly delineate where the boundary is but 90% and single digit are clear).

[Jocko Willink @jockowillink]

Podcast 327:
USS Liberty Survivors including @PhilTourney

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

Of course Trump loves the inflation. It allows him to weaponize the US military and the wealth of all the world's dollar users to his enrichment and the ancient grudges of his cronies.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Here we go again; the House is going to debate a clean reauthorization of the unconstitutional FISA 702 program tonight.

This program is used to surveil Americans without a warrant.

I’ll be joining the @cspan debate on the floor in the next hour… in opposition to this madness.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

All we did was send our military to the other side of the world, bombed Iran's bridges and elementary schools, then imposed a military blockade to crush their economy and population.

Then, out of nowhere, these deranged monsters shoot one of our peaceful liberatory helicopters.

These people only understand force! They're like from the 8th century.