Hacker News Reader

I don't claim to know the nuance of what you're trying to address with this.

Wouldn't it be simpler to simply protect a bitcoin private key with the encryption that you are challenging people to break?

Off the top of my head, the only downside I can see is that someone could drain the wallet without publishing the key, but people like to brag, so it seems unlikely to be a problem in practice.

View on HN

That would work if you were only demonstrating encryption or creating challenges related to encryption, but some challenges don't map very easily to a cipher (though you might be able to get them to map to a cipher key).

In Simplicity (and in a sense in Bitcoin Script) there's a broader concept of "if you show you know information X, you're entitled to this money", but it has this specific issue that if the information or the entitlement to receive money for knowing it isn't unique to a specific recipient, there will automatically be a witness swiping or front-running risk for architectural reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com