Author: eointierney

The Key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution
The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:

Directive Principles of Social Policy

The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.

As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.

Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:
- to promote the welfare of the entire people.
- to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
- to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
- to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
- to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
- to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
- to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
- to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.
There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.

An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.

There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.

Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.

Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.

Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis

The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.

There are almost 100,000 empty houses in Ireland, and about 10,000 homeless people, of which some 3,755 are children, in 1,739 families.

Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.

Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:

to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.

The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.

This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.

Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:

that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.

This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.

Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.

This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.

Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.

It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.
July 1, 2018
A Guide to Preventing Data Leakage
The Internet is a big old scary place, full of dark corners, strange protocols, dodgy individuals, unscrupulous corporations and cynical state-level actors.

The tools we use to access the Internet, though often very powerful, remain badly-designed. This is true not only in terms of the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI), but also in how they let us use and manage our data.

Most big Internet/Web companies use “dark patterns” to exploit normal human behaviors profitably, and often without serious consideration of the consequences to the average human psyche.

Every day there are hundreds if not thousands of severe security breaches, and every month or so we hear of egregious acts of deliberate abuse, or contemptible neglect on the scale of millions of individuals affected.

This is made worse by the sheer amount of data our devices leak, all the time. Pretty much every computer has a hardware backdoor, either explicitly as in the Intel Management Engine (perhaps added at the behest of the National Security Agency), and most mobile telephone modems are little black boxes over which the user has no control. Location, browser history, contacts, messages, emails, etc., etc,. are all leaked in multiple ways, through apps and websites, through wifi and 4G, and worst of all directly from the operating systems.

For example, in this video, we load the following sites simultaneously in a Firefox browser and use Lightbeam to visualise all the links made between sites by loading shared assets such as images, scripts, style sheets and other data common to any website.

Simulating a typical browsing session on 18 sites (nytimes.com, theguardian.com, huffingtonpost.com, en.wikipedia.orgi, skatehut.co.uk, amazon.com x 2, vox.com, bbc.com, cracked.com, facebook.com, trivago.ie, skyscanner.net, nbcnews.com, answers.com, weather.com, ie.match.com, imgur.com) you can see 384 different servsers now have data on how you access these websites. The extreme amount of inter-connectivity is quite a show!

Now we reload the same 18 pages with partial tracking prevention plugins to Firefox and observe only 58, and these only minimally.

What follows is a guide to ‘tightening up’. This advice is intended for personal use. It is broken down into sections so it can be implemented in stages. Each section is colour-coded according to difficulty as follows:

Easy – even for Grandpa

Normal – can set up email on phone

Hard – summon nearest teenager

Difficult – might need professional help

Problem: Hardware

At the bottom of the stack we have the hardware problem, which is that most computers are not totally under the control of their users, and usually have at least one but often two or more completely independent, remotely-controlled, onboard computers. On Intel chips it’s called the Intel Management Engine, on AMD it’s called the AMD Platform Security Processor. Most mobile telephones use a proprietary technology from Broadcom, a massive US company, and are made in China, and are known to have a variety of intentional holes in their security.

Solution: Use AMD products on the Laptop/Desktop and wait for Purism Mobile (and verified RISCV in the long term).

AMD make all the main desktop/laptop/server chips that are not made by Intel, and have a better reputation.

The Purism mobile project (Librem 5) is the great hope for everyone interested in fully user-controlled mobile phone. It will hopefully be ready in about a year. RISCV is a completely open, community-created, modern-chip-architecture that promises high-performance in both number of computations per second and energy use.

Problem: Operating System

Here we get to the big one, the choice of “church”. There are four main options: Apple, Google, Microsoft, GNU/Linux.

Apple is the most cultish OS, a mono-aesthetic walled garden, famous for its ‘taste’ and convenience, infamous for its rigidity and cost. They manage their app store jealously, refusing programs that interfere with their ability to profitise your time on their systems. They have a well-funded reputation for safety, frequently destroyed for those in the know by errors such as the ability to login in remotely as administrator without a password. Their mobile efforts are more secure in some ways, but Apple themselves still extract huge amounts of ‘telemetry’ on every user, for their own and others benefit.

Google offer Android. Google make money by selling advertising to third parties, along with detailed information about how to use best their platform. Android, though quite secure in certain aspects from a technical point of view, is still essentially a mobile person monitoring device. Google recently removed their famous “Don’t be evil” motto from their handbook.

Microsoft sell Windows 10, the latest version of the most widely and successfully attacked operating system ever. Microsoft have been in trouble all over the world for their antics. Their devices send vast amounts of ‘anonymized’ data back to headquarters deliberately, and to pretty much every major Internet crime group as well.

GNU/Linux is a multi-decade community-driven operating system initiated by one of the true heroes of privacy and freedom: Richard Stallman. It is now developed all over the world, in the open, by companies such as Google (who use it internally to power their advertising thought-trap) and organisations such as CERN and NASA. It powers most of the Internet, and is freely used on everything from wireless routers to phones to laptops to supercomputers.

Solution: Linux Mint, the easiest and most polished operating systems distribution (free as in speech and as in beer)

Difficult, but not impossible

Problem: Safe Browsing

We use a browser for nearly all our general use of the Internet. This is great as it provides an all-in-one tool that can do everything from email to games, but distressingly insecure as it is a one-stop-shop for tracking people’s habits online. There are four main browsers, each associated with one of the operating systems listed above.
- Apple – Safari (also runs on Microsoft)
- Google – Chrome (also runs on Apple, Microsoft, GNU/Linux)
- Microsoft – Edge
- Gnu/Linux – Firefox (also runs on Apple, Google, Microsoft)
Solution: Firefox and Tor Browser Bundle

Only one choice here, but it comes in two varieties: Firefox, and Firefox packaged as the Tor Browser Bundle.

Firefox is a powerful, research-driven, privacy-focussed, standards-compliant, community-backed browser. All the code is open-source, meaning is can be and is examined out in the open by experts all over the world. The non-profit organisation that oversees Firefox, Mozilla, is very clear in its motives. The Tor Browser Bundle wraps the browser with the Tor project, providing vastly increased anonymity online, at the expense of being slower to use due to the added encryption complexity.

Firefox is better with plugins, here are a few to get you started (these can break many websites):
Problem: Your Internet Service Provider/Mobile Phone Operator

Companies that sell you Internet Access are almost all required by law to record a lot of data about your activity.

Solution: A Virtual Private Network such as Proton VPN

A VPN sets up an encrypted point-to-point link from your computer/phone to another computer in a server farm elsewhere on the Internet. This hides your IP address (one of the most important tracking details), and some other data.

Solution: Use TOR

TOR is a method of encrypting your network traffic over a randomised colection of links over the Internet. It is quite secure, more so than only a VPN, but really quite slow. Used with a VPN (computer -> VPN -> TOR) it is quite effective.

Problem: The Law in every jurisdiction

Every Government on the planet reserves the right to legislate on people’s use of the Internet, and exercises it to varying degrees. The Government of the U.S.A., instrumental in the development of the Internet, reserves quite ridiculous authority to interfere, and uses and abuses this with aplomb.

Solution: Stay in the EU/become an EU citizen

Amazingly, the EU, the latest political hegemony in the most consistently abusive collective polity in human history, is now the bastion of Human Freedom. It is actually becoming quite effective in this role, and improving all the time.

Solution: Enforce Human Rights Law

‘Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’

Problem: Web Services and Social Media

The entire business model of providing web services (email in your browser, for example) and social media is to monetise the data you give up by using these services.

Solution: Don’t, just don’t (at least not yet)

There are a small number of privacy-respecting web-services/social media organisations that provide most, but not all, of what we expect from these systems. They are still young, suffer from technical and User Experience problems, and have yet to achieve critical mass. In a few years, perhaps sooner, the landscape will be very different. Instead, just give people a ring, or write them a postcard, or just make sure to look them up next time you are near. If everyone reaches out the world becomes small.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides the best overall guide to being safe online. Read more here.
June 1, 2018
The Man Who Lit a French Fire Under English Football

Arsène Wenger is special.

He enabled the Invincibles, only the second team not to lose once in an entire season in one of the most competitive leagues in the world. He fostered so many of the talents who shone not only for him but all their clubs and countries. His best teams played some of the loveliest soccer, fast, tough, and often breath-takingly skillful. He introduced modern diet and conditioning. He won most of the available competitions at least once, with the significant exception of the Champions League.

He’s one of the most philosophical of football men. His great failing is that he is fundamentally an Economist.

Wenger’s austere, intellectual, worldly yet kind approach, combined with his deep understanding, allowed him to alloy continental notions of diet and training with native English hard-running and combative effort. He gave out PhD’s in soccer. He maybe didn’t win enough, but he built a future not just for his club but for the game. He is a coach who could lecture a board of directors on amortization as easily as train a teenager in positioning.

His best teams possessed great strength, speed, technique, and will. Doughty personalities worked hard for each other, with honesty and compassion. Composed of players from all over the world they were nonetheless clearly Arsenal players. They played for their shirt, their fans. They played for Arsène.

The goals, so many great goals, my favourite Bergkamp’s spatio-temporal short-circuit:

Henry’s goal is another triumph of outrageous athleticism, creativity, and skill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy5iZh86e4

Wenger’s other great achievement was his facilitation of the move from the old Highbury stadium to the Emirates, all the while managing to avoid the vast debts that have impaired so many other clubs. He tended to buy young players and develop them, selling on those not quite his type, and only in later years splurged, unsuccessfully, on a few marquee names. He was truly a manager not a coach. Players speak of his trust in them to learn, his expectation of intelligence and willing curiosity.

Throughout it all, his anachronistic, prickly, “didn’t see it,” demeanor both charmed and irritated. He could be kind and overbearing at the same time, like a tired old schoolteacher reaching deep for the patience needed to help his errant charges, and was often especially so with journalists. Perhaps unwittingly he provided a theatrical counterpoint to the gruff, over-manly, almost thuggish displays of other managers.

In recent years his inability to spend, or spend wisely, has enervated his squads. They have done well to provide a reminiscent value, and a kind of tactical test, against which all other Premiership teams must measure themselves twice a season, but they have not looked close to being able to challenge for honours. They still have a ropey defense, their midfield is slight, and their strikers profligate if not disinterested. They flatter and deceive in equal measure. They have become an echo of an idea of a kind of football, and the world has moved on with typically robust lack of romance. Too much an economist to be a romantic Wenger nonetheless seems trapped in an ideological hall of soccer mirrors, forever seeing some variant of old reflections staring back at him.

Au revoir Arsène, et merci.

May 1, 2018
Why is Software so Complicated?
In the beginning in order to count we used, as we still do, our fingers, and sometimes our toes. Not only are they conveniently arranged according to the prime divisors of their sum (2 and 5 multiplied make 10, and no other primes less than 10 divide evenly therein), but we can also fold them up and down according to our needs, so allowing a primitive but very effective memory aid.

In more recent times the abacus was was the paradigm of calculation. It was efficient, communicable, and easily learned, mainly because it is like having many more fingers we can fold up and down.

Chinese Abacus.

In the ‘good old days’ of early electro-magnetic computation we programmed directly onto the computer via switches. Think of an abacus with an automatic left-alignment capability. We still need to know how to use an abacus but we can mechanically automate left-alignment. Things progressed to abstractions such as punch-cards, which could be prepared in one’s own time and then inputed into the computer to perform the calculations.

Punch-card.

As you can see there are similarities between punch-cards and an abacus. They both use a columnar layout, they are of limited scope, and both require familiarity with arithmetic. Already we can also see the increase in complexity, both in terms of the density of the information on display and the amount of meta-information used.

Nowadays we have the X86-64 architecture. Good luck with that.

Modern microchip.

And yet, even though these devices are so tiny and complicated that they operate near the limits of measurability itself, to such an extent that the designers have to worry about electrons jumping from one adjacent wire to another and hence spoiling everything, we don’t need luck to make them work. We use abstractions!

We encode these abstractions in software. The first recognised programme was designed by Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage on the Analytical Engine, and calculated Bernoulli Numbers. Ever since we have been working to increase both the power and clarity of our ability to communicate our calculable ideas both to computers, and to other humans.

As a brief digression, programming is at least as much about sharing thought with other people as it is with computers. A good piece of software not only runs efficiently on whatever the hardware requires; it is also easily understood by other programmers so that when, not if, it needs to be altered to fix errors, or extend its functionality, this can happen with a minimum of stress.

So why IS software complicated? Some of the reasons are:
- Hardware gets more complicated and so the requirements to programme them becomes more complicated.
- The ecosystem gets more complicated as we create more and more general libraries each of which specialises in one particular competence (for example numerical calculations).
- New techniques are developed all the time, normally coming from academia, especially the field of Pure Mathematics.
- We demand ever more functionality from our computers, such as real-time communication, or fancy graphics.
- We keep on adding leaky abstractions.
As seen above, computer hardware is becoming more and more complicated as the years go by, and this rate of increasing complexity is well described by one of the most famous heuristics in the industry: Moore’s Law which states: ‘the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits doubles every eighteen months’. This has held true for over sixty years, though we are coming up against hard quantum mechanical limits now. While this means we can perform more calculations, faster, than ever before, it also means the hardware is becoming more complicated, and so the software needed to manage the hardware must keep pace.

A contemporary operating system is typically composed of many millions of lines of code, broken into many different parts. Typically an operating system comprises a kernel that interfaces directly with the hardware, and many libraries that specialise in tasks such as networking or the graphical user interface, as well as the programs most users need, such as word processors, games, and web browsers.

In Mathematics itself there is a more than two-thousand year quest to define and guarantee the correctness of the subject itself, and quite apart from every novelty of efficient computation, the foundations themselves have undergone radical development in recent years. One hundred years ago Set Theory was introduced and has served well, if trickily, ever since. The trickiness involved, as well the seeming vagueness of some of the underlying assumptions, further led some, especially L. E. J. Brouwer, to try to reformulate Mathematics on an ‘intuitionistic’ basis. This in turn led to the recent Univalent Foundations and Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT). HoTT, in particular, shows considerable promise in allowing us to reason with great abstraction and powerful correctness on the theory and practice of programming.

The face of a man who looked upon infinity and saw only potential.

Our demands for greater ‘power’ impose constraints that can only be met with greater complexity. Without going into great detail, as we move from the relatively simple one-to-one, client-server computational architecture to a fully distributed computation model, as is ubiquitous in Nature (the speed of light guarantees a locality of computation), so we are more and more reliant on the subtle and intriguing theories such as Paxos, which no matter one’s expertise is still not simple. Developments in this area, from the use of bunches of graphics cards for statistical modeling, to the growth of secure data storage systems, tend to be significant both in terms of novelty and difficulty.

Abstractions, especially as implemented by the congenitally lazy programmer, tend to reveal too many of the underlying assumptions, and hence ‘leak’ complexity both up and down our level of abstracion, though mainly up. These leaks then require us to stick our fingers in the complexity dyke, and no matter how many fingers we may abstract, the water of complexity will tend to flow downwards, around and past and through our ability to count. (Reality is not necessarily countable.)

So what can we do about it? The answer is simple, we can provide simplicity through abstraction.

Let me give you an example. When we are young and learning to count we learn first to count to ten, using our fingers. Each count has its own term, one, two, three, etc.. Then we learn how to count to twenty, and the terms associated. The thirties follow, and the forties, and patterns begin to form. Then, like a piece of magic, we learn how number can be represented in table.

Having constructed a table of the first hundred number we can not only extend this to the first one thousand, but also to the first million, as befits our patience. More importantly we can abstract over the pattern, and use this pattern in its most general sense, allowing each entry of the first one hundred to refer to a table of one hundred, thereby giving a table of tables, of numerical size 10,000, or as the Greeks would have it, a myriad. So we abstract, for we are ‘outside the area contained within the lines drawn’.

Of course, for this to work, we need to know and understand the complexities, we need to measure them, and abstract over them, and most of all we need to learn Mathematics, for it is the language of abstraction.

Huge efforts have been made in this field, and are ongoing. Coq is a fabulous development, as is Agda, and Haskell and Rust are becoming mainstream. In Mathematics itself there is still roiling debate and vigorous argument about the nature and validity of abstraction, both pure and applied. The conversations around these topics leach into Computer Science of course, but also Philosophy, Law, Economics and even Political Science.

Programming is like a mixture of Poetry and Mathematics. It has all the rigour of Poetry and all the interpretability of Mathematics.

You want to know the secret of success in this field, as in so many others?

Play. Look at children learn. From repetition of simple tasks that adults find mind-numbingly boring children learn the abstractions that give them all their languages, all their games, all their mastery over themselves and other things. So it is with mathematicians, they play with numbers and their patterns. So it is with programmers, computers are the toys with which they learn the abstractions to understand things simply, but no simpler.

Make like a child, be simple, practice, and understand. This is the simplicity of software.

The featured image, taken by John McSporran which shows up in searches of complexity with reuse rights, is aptly entitled ‘complexity’. Though not a picture of software it is undeniably complicated, and also beautiful, and a good deal more intuitively so than any map of dependency graphs. It also, perhaps amusingly, evokes Ted Stevens’ series of tubes.

Eoin Tierney is the Science Editor of Cassandra Voices.
April 1, 2018
Building Better than Bitcoin

Bitcoin and the Blockchain are perhaps the most hyped technology today, rivalling even Artificial Intelligence for extreme predictions and outrageous claims. We need to talk about the ecology.

Bitcoin is a cryptographically-backed, anonymous, pseudo-currency invented by the otherwise unknown Satoshi Nakamoto. It has a dollar value because it is traded on the market, as can be seen here. It is used to trade in everything from lattes to guns, and is always free of jurisdictional monitoring and hence taxation. In other words it enables criminal transactions. The value of Bitcoin has grown quite predictably since its creation. This is not my main problem with Bitcoin.

The Blockchain, on which Bitcoin is built, is a hideously inefficient means of computing a tally of transactions. There are many superb descriptions of how it works, such as the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9KAnkZUjU

It is sometimes perceived as an intellectually-elegant formulation, provably sharing a settling of a kind of account. However it costs too much. Picture a train of carriages. There is a first carriage, normally with an engine. Other carriages may be attached to this engine. Any human can get on and off the system of carriages at any time, by adding their own carriage, and may insist that everyone else who ever entered a carriage witness this, mathematically, by adding each carriage to their own description of where the carriages are positioned in the train. This is a huge computational load on all the witnesses.

This is the fundamental purpose of the blockchain. It provides a mathematically sound proof that a certain computational task has been performed and does it in such a way that it can be demonstrated by anyone else in the chain.

While the asymptotic nature of Bitcoin is implied in the above it makes sense to put this in context. An asymptote is a limit to which a function can computationally approach. In Mathematics we can use purely analytical techniques to describe the overall behaviour of such functions, indeed these techniques are fundamental to the theory of Calculus. When we have to determine the stepwise approximation numerically matters can become quite complicated and require significant time and effort.

An example of this asymptotic approach, though not necessarily the most correct, is the value of the fundamental constant Π. We learn in school that Π has a value of roughly 3.14, and this suffices for schoolroom exercises. Archimedes created techniques that foreshadowed Newtonian calculus by over a thousand years in his ingenious calculation of this transcendental number‘s digital expansion. We can now determine Π to billions of places of precision, but we will never know it as accurately as its simplest formulation: the area of a circle is Π times the radius squared. In other words, the idea of Π as a proportion is vastly more accurate than any numerical approximation. Bitcoin utilises this asymptotic approach to guarantee that the number of Bitcoins it is possible to calculate has an upper bound of 21 million, and that it gets proportionally harder to do so.

Most, though not all, contemporary encryption relies on one simple and strange fact: it is vastly easier to multiply two prime numbers to get another number than it is to do the reverse. Thus it is easier to multiply 5 and 13 to get 65 than it is to analyse 65 to determine what two prime are its divisors. This gets harder the bigger the number. Why this is so is deep and suggestive and still not properly understood. Indeed the study of prime numbers is perhaps the single greatest motive for the entire subject of Mathematics. They are bizarre, profound, and remarkably useful, far past their role in encryption. In particular Bitcoin, via the Blockchain, uses the very well studied SHA-256 hash function.

As a result all the theoretical constraints outlined above and elsewhere, Bitcoin is inefficient. Like a giant out-of-control paper clip machine it now requires more energy per month for it’s computations than the Republic of Ireland’s. This is a clear signal we are not communicating effectively with regard to distributed proof-of-computational-work schemes. Indeed the very mention of schemes calls the work of Alexander Grothendieck to mind. He would regard this as no soaking of the walnut. (He preferred not to crack a walnut of a problem using advanced techniques but soak it instead in his understanding, so that it might be peeled apart with the fingers of his mind and thereby yield much deeper understanding).

And now we come to the real problem of Bitcoin. It is trying to solve the wrong problem. We have long suffered the Identification/Authentication/Authorisation problem. Even DNA analysis, which can be very accurate, takes significant effort to compute. Adding a requirement of secrecy to this, while constrained by modern understandings, imposes unacceptable computational cost.

Bitcoin solves the wrong problem, badly. We can and will do better, by using more sophisticated Mathematics, to develop more efficient distributed proof of work.

Right now there are far too many exploitative people working in Finance, Computer Science, and even alternative Politics, who are jumping on the Blockchain Bandwagon, and encouraging others to do likewise because they can profit, monetarily, through their comparative sophistication.

Put it another way, no working mathematician I know recommends Bitcoin, yet every single one recommends the study of Number Theory. Who do you trust more? Financiers or Mathematicians?

Eoin Tierney is the Science editor of Cassandra Voices.

March 1, 2018
What future for Sport?

Don’t hit your head on the way out.

Sport is breaking as much as making. The playful testing ground for youth has become an investment vehicle for the idle rich, and is about to come up against the limits of human reality.

Sport is being tested, in Law and laboratory, for its ability to not only help but harm.

Thanks to Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator

Concussion is the greatest concern. American Football, Rugby, and Soccer, are all under investigation for short- and long-term consequences of the sudden jarring of brain in skull. Injuries in general worry parents all over the world. Excessive wear and tear on leg joints that will yield early arthritis, surgeries on shoulders, wrists, hands, and feet, dietary aberrations and poisonous supplements, drugs and therapies of dubious efficacy, all and more are suffered to maximise the sporting capability of young bodies.

Further idiocy is seen in the recent Australian Open where ‘Djokovic said he was “right at the limit” of his stamina’, due to excessive and unnecessary exposure to the sun. There are other types of hurt in Sport. The mental anguish of failure, either as an individual or as part of a team, compounded by the often vitriolic chants and slurs of the audience, can do immense and lasting damage no matter what the age or experience of the participant.

The same bad behavior is often seen pitch-side at the games of juveniles, with filth-tongued parents hurling accusations and exhortations that in a workplace would elicit a quick call to HR and the Legal department. Even supposedly civilizing games such as Cricket tolerate not only consistent verbal harassment called “sledging”, and until recently could still be deadly as with Phillip Hughes’ tragic death due to a fast bowled cricket ball hitting his head in an area unprotected by his helmet.

I can make a prediction: The Law will free sport from wanton injury.

Law is our learning. It’s how we work together to agree on how we may work together, and minimise harm. We know how to harm each other, even in law but especially in reality. We should be able to enjoy interacting competitively without risk of hurting one another, no matter what the shape of the ball or court.

We must rule out the possibility of suffering concussion as a result of following the rules of a game.

Certain tackles in rugby, Gaelic football and hurling, heading the ball in Soccer, are all under review

Boxing? A sport predicated on concussion, horrifically termed the ‘sweet science’, can have no place in civilized society.

I can make another prediction: Rules of behavior at sporting occasions will be enforced with at least the standard shown in the workplace. When minors are present the standards will be higher again.

Sport will become what it always is when practiced by the experts: play. Watch children form and reform rules for their games, as they run around in patterns. So it is great sports-people give new insight into their games, pushing past the limits of what we thought was possible. The best show creativity and excellence, in ways that delight and wow us without ever trying to hurt someone else, indeed they are gracious and kind, no matter what happens.

The idea of Sport as battle needs to die, for it is practicing violence, and we really don’t need to do that anymore.

Eoin Tierney is an entrepreneur living in Dublin.

February 1, 2018