

Is this the most value-dense information on Earth? - perfmode
http://blog.perfmode.com/is-this-the-most-value-dense-information-on-earth/

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robseed
Chaitin's constant gets my vote for most valuable number.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant)

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pyalot2
I'd argue no. It's definitely some kind of valuable and/or dense, but it's not
that simple.

The value is purely held up by what value people ascribe to this information.
This can change rapidly (and it does), so the precise measure of value isn't
really known until you actually convert it.

If you actually try to convert in a short amount of time, it'll rapidly
destroy its own value, because the market doesn't have the kind of depth to
absorb a hundreds of millions of USD conversion, so the only way to satisfy
that bitcoin volume would be a rapid drop in price, which would lower the
amount of USD in order to satisfy it, or conversely, increase the purchase
power of everybody on the market.

The true value of this stash is thus, in fact, some fraction of the current
valuation of bitcoin. The larger the stash, the smaller the fraction becomes,
because the larger the stash, the less able will you be to realize the value.

This is the reason the winkelvii are creating an ETF. They're sitting on 1% of
the coins in existence. An attempt to realize profits would take an extremely
long time without moving the market quite adversely. So they need to create a
vehicle that allows them to massively increase the market depth.

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rch
How about peptides? The targeting end of the anti-obesity drug described in
[1] can be expressed as 7 characters (KGGRAKD) in a 20 character alphabet.
Another agreement [2] values candidate peptides at $32.8M each, even without a
specific therapeutic application. The same value could be applied to certain
short linear motifs, which could be composed of as few as 3 amino acids. These
strings don't suffer from the same liquidity problems that limit the real
value of bitcoin addresses either (i.e. the value is _really_ in the data).

[1]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3666164/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3666164/)

[2] [http://www.arrowheadresearch.com/press-releases/arrowhead-
an...](http://www.arrowheadresearch.com/press-releases/arrowhead-and-shire-
enter-collaboration-and-license-agreement-develop-peptide)

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jerf
I'm sure a root private key from Verisign or something could give that a good
run for its money on a byte-for-byte basis, though it's harder to directly
valuate.

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hamburglar
The value is not wholly contained in the bits of the private key, it's also
dependent on other state (namely, the state of the wallet). Consider the value
of those bits once the money has moved.

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Tzunamitom
Depends how you define value... Arguably the knowledge that e=mc^2 is far more
valuable, and contained within much less data.

~~~
perfmode
Does secrecy matter?

There was a period in history where this claim was certainly true. Now, not so
much.

Information of this nature loses value when revealed.

That private key holds value until it becomes public. Then, the wallet is
plundered and its value falls to nought.

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downer94
Bruce Schneier once equated the security of a 256 bit private key by comparing
the energy needed to brute force all possible combinations of 256 bits to the
amount of energy harnessed for one year by a Dyson Sphere built around the
sun.

So maybe there's a correlation, in the sense of knowing the GPS coordinates of
Fort Knox, and targeting it with an ICBM?

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perfmode
link:
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html)

~~~
downer94
That's the one!

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chiph
At some point, someone's going to decide it'll be easier to try and crack that
key than mine.

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hrjet
Is that true? Can the "difficulty" level in hashing ever reach the bit-length
of the key?

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chiph
Technically, I don't know, as I don't personally understand the code behind
the mining and what the difficulty would be like to mine the very last
bitcoin.

But from a social aspect, cracking that key would be like hitting one of the
multi-state lotteries. And people continue to play them all the time, despite
the astronomical odds against their winning.

~~~
hrjet
Thinking about this a bit more, if it ever becomes reasonable to co-
operatively crack a key, it could only be a good thing for bitcoin economy.

1\. If the owner of the wallet still has access to it, they can easily
transfer the amount to smaller wallets, and reduce their risk.

2\. If the owner has lost access, it is good for the community to recover the
lost coins.

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adventured
There are financial holdings worth 100+ times that bitcoin wallet. Likely
protected by a lot less than 100 times the security of a 256 bit key.

Apple's hedge fund, Braeburn Capital, likely qualifies. It's arguably the
largest hedge fund in the world. Gain access to their network and you could
wreak serious financial havoc.

~~~
perfmode
It is probably the case that there are multiple cryptographically-secured
security layers standing between an anonymous internet user and the innermost
layer of such a system.

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adventured
I'm assuming you wouldn't try to go after their network from an anonymous
Internet user.

Rather, stuxnet comes to mind. We're talking about $150 billion after all.

Of course the other issue is, I'm betting they're holding a lot of short term
government securities. It simply isn't plausible to steal $70 billion worth of
short term US paper and do anything with it.

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sfrechtling
As an alternative to this, what about ICBM/Nuclear Launch codes - they have
the potential to destroy a lot of value (both natural, material and
psychological)?

Or even a terrorist's planning information prior to an event?

Or even genetic code?

~~~
georgecmu
Well, incidentally Minuteman launch codes were set to 00000000 for about 20
years [1]. Can you argue that zero entropy effectively reduces the number of
information bits to 0 and thus drives up the value per bit to infinity?

[1] [http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-
combination-...](http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-combination-
on-my-luggage/)

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whatshisface
Considering that anyone trying to sell that much bitcoin at once would pretty
much crash the currency, how much is it really worth?

Perhaps some kind of revolutionary mathematical fact could be worth even more?
This is a very interesting question.

EDIT: A lot of people responding to me seem to be trying to contradict my
argument by pointing out that if it was true, it would be true for almost
everything. I don't get how that works, because it _is_ true of everything!
Flooding the market will always reduce the value of what you are selling.

~~~
clarkm
That argument proves too much [1]. The same can be said for almost all stock,
e.g. Bill Gates could sell of his shares of Microsoft and crash the stock
price.

[1]
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proving_too_much](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proving_too_much)

~~~
Eliezer
No he couldn't. Microsoft shares have intrinsic earnings, and while the stock
price might go down, I wouldn't expect them to go down far enough to generate
predictable excess returns. Lots of people want predictable excess returns and
they have enough money to buy all of Gates's shares and then some.

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jere
>Thus, each individual bit protects USD $631,212... USD $631,212 per bit

That seems a rather flawed way of viewing the density, since that key
represents 2^256 possible combinations. So if you take a way a bit, the
density by that measure goes up 0.3%. Practically speaking, it should double.

Why don't we instead calculate the density as the expected value of guessing
one combination. In other words, let's say I have stolen an ATM card and can
wipe a bank account containing $100,000 by guessing the 4 digit pin:

$100,000/(10^4) = $10/guess

Or in our case:

$161,590,330/(2^256) = $1.39e-69/guess

Not so impressive now.

~~~
jsharpe
I agree that that makes a lot more sense in a way, but there is another
interpretation.

Suppose you are omniscient but that you have a terminal illness, and have 256
time units left in your life to give value to your heirs. Due to your illness,
you can only communicate by blinking. If you can give one bit of information
per time unit by blinking, what is the information you can give your heirs
that will maximize their inheritance?

~~~
jere
_Brevity is the soul of wit._

Omniscient? Well, I'm not very creative, but you should be able to get off at
least half a dozen lottery picks in that.

~~~
jsharpe
That's a good point. You'd have to restrict to information available to
someone at the current time, and not based on future randomness (like winning
lottery numbers). Otherwise, you could make (effectively) unbounded money by
just specifying the stock symbol of a company that gains the most in value in
the next year.

~~~
jere
Well, yes. I see your original point... it makes sense if you look at it from
a perspective of communicating the information rather than a security
perspective, which is what I was focusing on. Of course, that all assumes that
the receiver knows a priori they are receiving a key and what the key
corresponds to. And assuming you wanted to set something like that up, there
are a lot more dense ways to go about it. It reminds me of this:
[http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/we-went-
looking...](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/we-went-looking-
jason-rohrers-lost-board-game-didnt-make-it-very-far/)

In other words, bury massive inheritance in the desert. Issue a list of
1,000,000 GPS coordinates. Then you only need 10 bits.

