Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

In article <thivu3hv4rrqr2mn4hdn2d2g521rlgan1a@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Phillip Thorne
<pethorne@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>He'd probably want to avoid encryption software or suchlike -- the
>government doesn't pay nearly as well.  

This I disagree with.  I think cyber-security and encryption might be his
best 
bet.

Hash coding techniques like MD5 and SHA-1 have been broken, at least to
the 
extent of permitting collision attacks.  On to MD6 and SHA-2.

It is generally understood that sooner or later the difficulty of
factoring 
the products of large primes will be mathematically solved, at which time
the 
whole RSA encryption mechanism will break down.  With it will go all of 
on-line credit card sales, secure websites, interbank etfs, etcetcetc. 
The 
timing of this mental breakthrough is necessarily unpredictable.

So, he goes to college in mathematics, and is something of a wunderkind --

because mathematics does not change across cultural and other such 
boundaries and his understanding of math, which is merely average in his
own 
world/timeline, is way ahead of where we are.

As an undergrad he invents a new method of encryption that does not depend
on 
the difficulty of factoring the product of large primes, in which few
people 
show an interest because the existing method is entrenched.  He has a
small 
startup -- not much more than a website, really -- like that PGP fellow. 
Gets 
the patent on it, too.

For his PhD thesis, he publishes the seminal paper on a mathematical
method 
for the fast, automated factoring of the products of large primes. 
Basically, 
with a PC and a couple minutes you could break the public key of any
encrypted 
communications, reconstructing the private keys therefrom.  The world is 
facing the complete breakdown of all methods of secure communications.

He sells the patent on his new method to Microsoft/Visa/Oracle/Whoever for
$10 
billion in cash and stock.  They think they're getting a hell of a deal --
and 
they are -- but he doesn't care because that's all the more he needs.

As the timing of both mental breakthroughs is necessarily unpredictable,
and 
the methods of securing encrypted communication aren't particularly
noticeable 
or earth-shaking from an observer point of view, he is safe from detection
by 
observers in his own timeline.

And of course he already knew the method of easy factoring large primes
and a 
substitute method of encryption from his own timeline, where it's taught
in 
(the equivalent of) high school CS classes.

Oh, and have him go to college in Europe.  University here is more
formalism 
-- you gotta do the 4 years/120 hours, etc., and the PhD can take 5 to 8
years 
more -- whereas in Europe he could test through a bunch of stuff and
probably 
be out start-to-finish with the PhD in four years.

--
Rich (just jumping in here for a moment -- Hi everybody!) Weyand