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If they solved P = NP, their first intention would be selling it to the highest bidder. NSO hackers are the digital equivalent of mercenary soldiers.



They don’t really have to, they can just mine Bitcoin by reversing SHA256 in polynomial time, inspect https messages to banks, or send Bitcoin to themselves by creating an ECDSA signature… or just set up a software as a service and have the biggest business in the world.


That's assuming that the solution to whether P=NP is P=NP and not P≠NP, isn't it?


>they can just mine Bitcoin by reversing SHA256 in polynomial time

This wouldn't be faster than ASICs. The coefficients would be too big for it to be practical.


n^10 is a polynomial too.

The equality of P and NP would not itself mean there are fast solutions.


Heck, even if P=NP meant there were fast solutions, merely proving that P=NP wouldn't necessarily give you those solutions, and they might turn out to be even harder problems!


> digital equivalent

In fact, many are literally mercenary soldiers!


kinda like Werner von Braun, maybe. he just wanted to make rockets. whether they were for Nazi Germany or the US didn't matter, whether they were missiles or spacecraft didn't matter, he just wanted to build them.


Which we have a descriptive word for: unethical. The colorful word would be: disgusting


"When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun." ~ Tom Lehrer


"Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical"


There’s nothing unethical about a scientist working on weapon development for their country in the middle of a war. Imagine it’s 1935 and you lack the modern perspective. I mean you might not like it, but I don’t think there’s an ethical violation here.


I'm not sure what world you live in where saying "I don't care if I'm making missiles for Germany or the USA" is not an ethical violation and is somehow patriotism... but I don't want to live in it with you.


You’re being unfair by enforcing a modern perspective, shaped by the victors, on an enemy from 80 years ago. Were Soviet weapons scientists unethical too?


I think it's barbaric to calmly send a request for more slaves (Jews other minorities) for the factory work, due to them inconveniently dying too fast. Because of the inhuman working conditions. I read that he did that all. He wasn't merely a patriotic, unaffected scientist, he played a part in the holocaust.


You’re moving the goalposts - the subject discussed was the participation of scientists in weapon programs. He might have been a scum (I think it’s trivializing what happened in Germany at that time, I digress), but his participation in the war effort is not unethical in itself. Thousands of kilometers away, other scientists toiled on a weapon that makes all the weapons the Nazis developed seem benign.


I think it's beyond barbaric to calmly send a request for more slaves (Jews other minorities) for the factory work, due to them inconveniently dying too fast. Because of the inhuman working conditions. I read that he did that all. He wasn't merely a patriotic, unaffected scientist, he played a part in the holocaust.


maybe "amoral"




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