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Derek Ross | 1 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +2 
 As for hash rate, it does make sense to me for governments with a vested interest in Bitcoin to want to mining and defend the network themselves, just like non government users do.

Maybe he doesn't have any other arguments beyond that because they don't exist. 

How is he a spook? You know he works for the US government. So to thousands of other Bitcoiners. They just don't tell you. A spook would be someone that doesn't tell you.
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SHSS | 1 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +2 
 What you said is not a new idea. He was outright saying or implying you can use the hash rate to protect other things other than the network. 

I mean spook in the sense that he may not be what he presenta himself as being. The way he came into the scene is kinda sus. The general vibe is off, but that’s just my opinion.
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MachuPikacchu | 1 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Just speculating here, but it might be possible to leverage the hash rate and messages passed via Bitcoin’s blockchain for security.

Think something like OpenTimestamps. One idea could be that you set up a firewall that requires an extremely high proof of work before accepting packets. The firewall might be some specialized hardware for this.

If your message was passed inside a block you could use the PoW from that? The idea is to set the bar prohibitively high and the bar doesn’t get higher than the PoW applied to bitcoin.

Again just speculating. I imagine if the guy had a novel idea he wouldn’t divulge the advantage publicly…
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SHSS | 1 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Or you can use signal or simpleX. 

We already have strong cryptography. No need to add pow to messaging. POW is just how we determine who gets to update the ledger.
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MachuPikacchu | 1 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Cryptography doesn’t prove the sender expended energy.

You can require the message be encrypted but the sender could’ve sent 100M emails. If your service requires PoW then it prevents a denial of service. You can also require requests to be collateralized with bitcoin so that the attacker needs to think twice. If they send to a honeypot they lost their corn and got nothing in return.

Forcing the messages to touch the chain severely restricts the volume of requests and also leaves a public audit trail. Again I’m just speculating here and honestly don’t have a clue what he’s trying to do but there might be something there.