When Google Met WikiLeaks by Julian Assange

Author:Julian Assange [Assange, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2014-08-08T07:00:00+00:00

In this picture of a hash tree, every unit above the data blocks contains the hash of the information of the units below it; so Hash 0-0 contains the hash of Data block 1, Hash 0 contains the hash of Hash 0-0, and Hash 0-1, and so on. See “Merkle Tree,” Wikipedia, archive.today/zfXgV

With a “distributed hash tree,” the hashes that make up the hash tree are distributed over multiple computers.

179. In other words, using a digital authentication scheme where WikiLeaks publishes a digital signature of the hash to say that this hash corresponds to a document WikiLeaks has authenticated and published—just like a publisher’s imprint on the inside cover of a book, but impossible to fake.

180. Using a naming system like the one proposed, where the name is a hash based on the content of the thing it names, if anything changes about the content, the hash also changes. For example, the SHA256 hash for “Putin rode a horse” is 1284ffaa16df7c406c4528045e491f86cc3c57a9661a203aa97914c19a09a0df. But if the message is tampered with, the hash changes. The SHA256 hash for “Putin rogered a horse” is 9b24760c2ae1eba3cb8af2a8d75faadd5cd4dcb492fdb31ce60caafa3eb8597e.

Similarly, if the content is erased entirely, the hash remains, a reminder that that content existed, and a sign that something has been suppressed.

181. Bitcoin is a type of digital currency based on encryption. Like any other form of money it can be exchanged for dollars or other currencies or used to buy items, but there is no central bank and, unlike with fiat currencies, it is not controlled by state power.

The paper being referred to is actually an internet post on the Bitcoin Forum about the development of Namecoin, another, similar currency derived from the Bitcoin concept: archive.today/aY5j0

182. “Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change. Founded in the early 1990s, the movement has been most active during the 1990s ‘cryptowars’ and following the 2011 internet spring. The term cypherpunk, derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.” From Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (OR Books, 2012).

183. No one single computer is the source of all Bitcoins, unlike most currencies, for which there is a single agency (a central mint) that is responsible for printing all the money. Instead, as the fundamental unit of a Bitcoin is based on finding special hashes, any computer with enough computing power can “mine” or produce Bitcoins. For more information see the “Mining” section on the Bitcoin wiki: archive.today/LidYs

184. A hash collision is when two texts encode to the same hash. For example, if our hash function was “take the first letter of each word,” then an example collision would be hash(North Atlantic Treaty Organization) = NATO = hash(Never Again Trust Obama). Collisions are impossible for a secure hash, by definition, but Bitcoin uses an algorithm known as HashCash in which the difficulty of the collision problem is fine-tuned so that it is increasingly hard over time, but not impossible.

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