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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. It is speculated that the Devil can solve any mathematical problem and thus human crypto is useless to him, as he can just reverse all hashes, compute the discrete logarithms and factor arbitrarily large numbers.

So an NFT (or any other cryptographic artifact) is rather something that Satan can offer you for your soul.

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That's a running thing in my mind for years. The devil can do math. So It's an incredible lost opportunity when people are being possessed and we dont go and ask them some clever questions.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

Perhaps we should creat soulcoins which are a secure way of trading souls

Its true. Instead of oracle calls, I use Faustian bargains.

I meant more human-to-human selling of your soul, as an alternative to selling on ebay. Doesn't even require you to believe in the supernatural.

Money made with math seems like something the Devil would be into.

That's not the way math works. G-d himself can't reverse a hash.

Before you go invoking the "miracle" loophole, consider that miracles are logically impossible. If an impossible thing happens, then it was not in fact impossible. We just didn't understand the rules.

That's how maths works. Hashes are trivially reversible, all it takes is time, no miracle needed.

Oracles in complexity theory are a bread and butter concept

If two different x can produce the same y information is lost on the hash transformation. Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_. That said, Laplace's Demon is, well, a demon. Presumably the devil can get the demon to unspool time to see what the input was and the math doesn't matter, collisions or not.

In cryptography either you only need 'an x', in cases that the original x does not matter, or if it does, then you can just as easily find all x of size less than large enough N and find 'the x', it is still solely restricted by time.

Laplace's demon, information loss, Landauer's principle etc. are at most tangentially related to the problem discussed

You understand that isn't the same mathematically as reversing the hash? If you farm the set of all possible x and try them to see what works you do not have an inverse function in your hands.

> If you farm the set of all possible x and try them to see what works you do not have an inverse function in your hands.

I'm not sure I follow, what do I have then? Could you give me an example?

> Finding _an x_ for your y is not the same as finding _the x_.

Not in all cases, but in the case of NFTs and other cryptocurrencies, it is. If a second private key fulfills all constraints of the original one (like size and all computed results so far), it is functionally equivalent to the original one.

If hashes were trivially reversible, there'd be no cryptography.

You're thinking of something like a rainbow table. Definitely not the same thing as rewinding a function that loses information.

God himself is omniscient, so He by definition knows all the reverses of all hashes.

Also, to know the reverse of any hash you don't even need full omniscience, just "merely" the knowledge of anything that ever happened. Rewind the history of the universe, read the reverse from RAM when the hash was computed, done.

If God is omniscient, he can't do shit to punish you as he already knew you would commit a sin since the beginning of times.

Yes, the conflict of omniscience and free will is known in theology. I think they try to solve it by redefining omniscience to "being able to know everything but also being able to exclude stuff from one's knowledge".

Then there's no omniscience, because excluding oneself would cancel it.

“Can god create a paradox so mind bending even he gets confused?”

That's prior knowledge of the answer. Not the same thing as rewinding a trapdoor function. It's not very impressive if you already know the answer.

The omniscient one doesn't need to reverse a hash; they recognize immediately all possible values that could produce the hash.

So God had access to a really big rainbow table. Not terribly impressive for the supposed creator of the universe.

You are failing to grasp the notion that rainbow tables and knowing 51 factors to 17 and 3 are equivalent.

Back when I studied theology, the way we used to describe omniscience was to indicate that entities that exist outside of our universe can trivially see all points of our time stream.

Thus the hypothetical devil need not reverse the hash, they just have to view its creation to know what it was created from.

Anything existing outside out universe would have no access to anything happening inside it by definition. If the could access it, they would have to be part of the universe system. How else could information be transferred.

God is supernatural by definition. Anything we can compute, analyze and give logical meaning is just regular science.

For a god to have value to humans, however, that god would have to interact in some way with the natural world. Those things can be detected by science.

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