Quote from: kTimesG on Today at 06:52:10 PM

I thought SHA stands for Simple as Hell Arithmetic.

I mean, the state machine params are backdoor-ed by NSA. Zero explanations on how they chose those constants. Spooky, right?

Actually, how does that stuff even work? Do we do a double SHA after all (like our Motivated Reasoner friend says we should), or just hash some mod P coordinates a single time, before another hundred bit fizzling rounds with some weird thing called RIPEMD? Who's to guess? Also what does "^" even do? I think it can be reversed!

So many questions. I think somebody should look into all of these things, so we can have some final verdict. Also, why the heck are some base58 prefixes more likely to be found then others? I think there's a bug in the output of H160, this shouldn't happen. And best part? No one knows why!

Maybe we should ask AI how to do these things, it's too much to handle. The experts are nowhere to be found. They all dumped this shit on us, zero explanations why. They must be freaked out hearing there might be new methods of extracting a winning ball out from an urn, while blindfolded and jumping on one foot faster than a kangaroo covers a giant hash step.

I don't support the idea of prefixes, since I haven't seen any software that represents an improvement, but to say that if a probabilistic search works on an insecure bit, it means that cryptography is broken is like smoking a joint the size of a cucumber.