Immutability in the age of scam artists

Implications for peer review

Fellow Anandamigo, Dr. Lynn Fynn sent me a hilarious post from a online persona that loves to attack our work.

This time the persona (George Webb isn’t his real name) is claiming that we didn’t discover SV40 Promoters.

He did!

Here is a lesson where blockchains end these IT illiterate debates.

Knowing these sequencing results would likely end up in court, we hashed the Vaccine Sequencing read files (with SHA256) and etched those Hashes onto the Dash Blockchain.

This is an immutable ledger that cannot be changed and a copy exists on all globally distributed Dash Nodes. Dash is a fork of Bitcoin.

Figure 1

The links to these Hashing events (Hash and Stash) are at the bottom of the original Substack on this topic dated February 15th.

If you click on those links you will find the stamp certificates.

If you click on the last link in the image above you’ll end up on a blockchain explorer which will show a February 17th, 2023 transaction that has the Hash of our sequencing files. This file contains the reads which have SV40 promoters in them. This is irrefutable and immutable evidence of when these were found and since we own the private keys to these transactions, we can digitally sign a transaction to prove we own them.

This is known in the bitcoin space as a Hash and Stash. You take the Hash of your data file (a unique collision free fingerprint of your file- no other file can make that hash) and spend it into the OP_RETURN of a Bitcoin transaction and this digitally notarizes when your data file existed. Since SHA256 is a collision free hashing algorithm, no other file on earth can make that hash. If you change 1 letter in the file the hash will completely change. This is done to limit blockchain bloat. The sequences are too large to store on chain so you take a very compressed unique fingerprint of them and store that instead.

Various blockchains have this feature. We often use Dash as it has a faster block cycle, cheaper transaction fee and is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash and Ethereum all have this feature.

We do this for Cannabis genomes at Kannapedia.net and this Hash and Stash technique has been used in court to successfully defend the proper owner of certain cannabis genetics. The owner was able to prove in court that they were the original owner of the genetics based on the time stamps on chain that contained an OP_RETURN of a Hash from their sequencing file. The defendant therefor must have stolen a clone from this grower, changed it’s strain name and marketed a genetic copy of the plant. Prohibition doesn’t allow you to notarize your cannabis genetics at a Bank as the notary system is federal. Necessity is the mother of invention.

George Webb doesn’t have time stamps on immutable ledgers that prove he found anything.

To honor his bone headed claim, I made a Bitcoin Vanity address to record GWsukx into the bitcoin blockchain for eternity.

To do this you must iterate over the generation of 10M bitcoin addresses to find one that meets your regular expression. I only asked for GWsuk so with 32 threads cooking on my laptop at 1300 addresses/sec, I found one that happened to have an x after it. This would take a lot longer if I demanded it be case sensitive.

Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite (2^160).

To be more precise- This many can exist: 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

This large number is hard to imagine so this analogy is often used.

Hence, there is not enough time on earth for anyone to guess a BTC addresses private key with all the GPUs or ASICs in existence. Even if Quatum computers matured quickly at Google, they would make your bank passwords breakable decades before BTC is at risk. The entire Google ecosystem would be breached long before Bitcoin. this would put them in a pretty sticky pickle long before BTC would have to simply upgrade to a quantum resistant signature algorithm (an easy soft fork). And the BTC network will have advanced notice of when QCs are getting close to this as everything other than BTC would be hackable first and very noticeable. Also note that the advances Google claims to have made are not something ordinary computers can verify so its a “Trust Me Bro science by press release” that happened to move the price of the stock.

To generate public-private key pairs. You run random numbers through their Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and it makes you a unique Public-Private Key pair for each number. You can iterate this process 10M times to get one with 5 fixed letter. As you ask for 6, 7 and 8 letter vanity prefixes the time to randomly generate Public addresses that luckily find your desired pattern expands exponentially.

As a side note, someone tried to make one on Monero with 14 contiguous 9s in any place in the address. This is what it took.

So I kept my BTC graffiti short as I don’t really care to spend much on GwsUkx.

Feel free to donate to this address if you agree and I’ll spend the BTC on chasing down SV40 sequences in tumor samples.

1GwsUkx42tXX4gjTGF61fTNqa3C4VFAuP8

I tried to send $4.20 for GW but with fees and some limitations on txn size, we have a $5.00 txn in Bitcoin Block # 876697 using the above address.

This block has a collection of 179 txns in it totaling about $62K.

Why so many other transactions?

The miners sweep all of the broadcasted transactions from a public memory pool (mempool) of unconfirmed transactions. The first miner to collect enough transactions to fill a block (up to 4Mb) and solve a math problem related to that collection of addresses will broadcast that solution to the network for inclusion as the next block.

This math problem is like a sudoko puzzle. Its very hard to solve (800 Exahashes/sec) but very easy to verify. As a result, other miners will quickly adopt any broadcasted new block that verifies so they can quickly move on to the next set of transactions in the mempool. The Game Theory of this synchronizes the network. No one wants to work on transactions that are already embedded in an awarded block so they quickly verify newly broadcasted blocks and point their miners at un-mined transactions in the mempool.

You can see the GwsUkx address transaction in orange below.

Note- vanity addresses are fun and all, but they shouldn’t be used for large transactions as they are less secure than entirely random addresses.

This is why I believe peer review needs to be on chain. It solves the time-stamping of discovery problem. Its immutable and auditable by the world. You can automate it without journals and patent attorneys. There is a $2Trillion motivation to keep this data maintained on ~20,000 redundant BTC nodes around the world.

So GWsUkx isn’t just in a tweet that can be censored by X. It is now on 20,000 globally distributed nodes and you need more than $2 Trillion to erase it. Nostr is a social media network that has an architecture that mimics this. I use the Primal app to access it. People can Zap you Satoshi’s for tweets they like.

A Satoshi is the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin (1/100,000,000th of a Bitcoin). So when BTC hits $1M/coin in the next few years, a Satoshi will be worth 1 US cent).

You can find me on Nostr here-

This decentralized immutability is also true for the 2,182 Cannabis genomes we have put public. Hashes for these sequence files exist across multiple blockchains distributed globally.

There are other aspects of immutable ledgers that revolutionize peer review. You can learn more about that here-

The take home message is that Bitcoin is a more ground breaking invention than the Gutenberg printing press. The printing press was expensive and became centralized. Quickly, Churches and politicians tried to control what could be printed. This persists today with online censorship and debanking. Bitcoin fixes this. Finally we have the first amendment manifested in cryptography. Naturally the 1st use of this is for making a globally distributed ledger which is quickly soaking up the $130T bond market. Permission-less, decentralized and immutable. This should be the foundation for securing the scientific record, too often hijacked to craft narratives that limit peoples freedom.

Oh, and don’t forget,

GWSukX