Again, it’s not that google couldn’t pull it off. It’s that they stole technology from a firm that was and is operating quite well.

Do your own due diligence :)

The world is a big place. The telcom needs (and other uses of an airborne payload agnostic platform) is immense.

Opex costs dominate . Our capital stack is …. complex.

Patent trolls? No. Do some research and you can read the court case etc . :) They tried to rip off a small business. Nasty stuff.

Cost isn’t really an issue for them. They are desperate for any other source of scalable revenue other than the ad business .

As for hurdles and costs etc , right now it’s like any other business. Finding the right talent , partners and vendors .

Re project loon , they stole that tech from another organization and lost the court case :)

So , starting with not stealing other people’s tech. Beyond that, we’ve developed an approach to industrial scale envelope manufacturing we believe will work and are fundraising for it.

I would be happy todo so . Not sure how to go about that (is it initiated by mods or ?)

An excellent brief on the stack , politics etc . Very well written.

They are also eating their own tail and further shrinking launch windows and they have substantial capacity limits due to physics. Satellite internet is great in theory , not so great in practice.

That being said , anything that improves the access situation is welcome.

We are watching them closely . They are opening doors for us with space force etc.

Founder and CTO of suborbital systems here. We are competing with Starlink / Starshield and offering to all customers .

Using high altitude balloons.

I’m not entirely sure what a DAO implementation would look like.

The idea is to find a set of tools / patterns / approaches that distribute and de centralize decision making to the lowest level (if possible eliminating levels entirely ) .

I also see it as a practical set of technologies that would allow votes by coop members on a blockchain for example.

That’s the long version of what I was trying to say ! Very well put!

We have a long way to go for BTC/SATS to be equal, let alone surpass / replace fiat.

It takes lots of boring , grinding work. It requires deep understanding of people / process / systems .

Has anyone done the (boring but necessary ) front and back office work to make this possible ?

Create a mini economy ? Supply chain , payroll etc etc.

For a soloprenuer this could be possible.

The whole world runs on fiat. How can we make crypto at the very least an equivalent viable choice ? Let’s get out of the ivory tower and into the tactical reality .

"North Korea commits cryptocurrency theft by just attacking cryptocurrency exchange platforms and custodians, because the security in most of them suck, and badly."

Yes. This is very true. I enjoyed The Lazarus Heist podcast for a deep dive on all that.

I've toyed around with launching a crypto exchange. Riding the rails of our high assurance and compliant infrastructure we are building out anyway as we go through all the hoops to be a prime US Government contractor with facility clearance etc. Once you have your own proper PKI and K8S, it's amazing how "easy" everything becomes and how low your marginal costs drop. :)

"Companies do little to nothing when it comes to security innovation"

Do you mean end user organizations? Customers of vendors? Or are you referring to the vendors? (I know the blame lies with both). Things like the Zero Day Initiative are a great way to help bridge the gap and allow researchers to research "safely" and organizations to get their act together.

I hang out in /r/netsec and other similar forums.

Thank you for the detailed/principled reply. It's appreciated.

I know your being somewhat sarcastic.

My money is on the entire FAANG etc having their Thales based root CA keys compromised . I’ve been less than impressed with security measures taken around key material and/or network security in general.

Once you start really understanding the full capabilities and vulnerabilities of these commercial CA appliances , you realize how massive the attack surface is.

My current stack is Nitro key HSM with XCA on an air gapped laptop. Keep it all in a decent safe with cameras and alarm system.

I’m guessing most folks record it somewhere on their hard drive ?

For example , the post the other day with a GPG encrypted copy of the pass phrase. They entered the alphanumeric password at some point and had the pass phrase (seed phrase I guess ?) in a plain text file.

What are the best practices these days ? Anyone to follow / read for good security guides (for crypto specifically ).

Mostly this is an academic thought exercise , a “curated gentle troll” meant to get the community thinking and ideating.

As someone who’s taken many security precautions (including an air gapped offline root CA and GPG primary private key , using multiple yubikeys (one for daily use , one for more sensitive things , one for airgap ) , I take security quite seriously.

I’m always interested to discover new resources

Most people don’t stay focused and executing for 10 years :)

Most people don’t do the homework Most people don’t build the necessary customer / vendor / partner pipeline Most people don’t go deep on the organizational design Most people don’t have the (passive) revenue from day 1 Most people are reinventing something that already exists

It’s why I’m raising money last :)

I put in the groundwork.

Happy to discuss more . Email is in my bio or we can talk here publicly .

Currently , we are not a DAO.

What do you mean by legal cover ?

Ultimately I want to figure out , from “day 0” how to properly architect things in an organization to follow the values we all espouse and strive for.

Stealing of bitcoin holdings.

Via any number of methods , ultimately resulting in a keystroke logger or something being planted.

Hardware wallets mitigate the risk to some extent.

Excellent .

I’m curious , do you use any of the coding assistants ? Are they any good? It seems to be a somewhat bimodal distribution between amazing and garbage !

Our balloons will use Lora. Both the balloon computer itself (for command / control on a dedicated hardened network ) and our m2m/IOT flying backbone (for customers with IOT devices outside cell range )zz

Lora is amazing !

My guess on this is that $WESTERN_INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY_BOOGYMAN thinks with high confidence that some kind of gpg 0 day exists . Or , I should say, is being actively exploited/used. 0 days existing in the gpg codebase is almost certainly 100% lol.

Put some cash up that’s probably less than the daily coffee budget and see who bites.

Or alternatively, they want to find a particular collection of compute that they can’t otherwise locate, and whatever methods used for factoring the key / passphrase has a signature.

Yes, I am completely guessing. I have no idea.