Talk:Crown Sterling

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Beware of overloading a page with formulas

@Nomoresecrets, you might want to take a look at these two related discussions: "Talk:Modern Science in the Bible#Too big article!" and "RationalWiki:Technical support#So did we ever figure out why the "Modern Science in the Bible" article is inaccessible?" There have been ongoing, intermittent problems with loading the page Modern Science in the Bible, and the conclusion of what the cause is seems to be: large amounts of text + lots of calls to the wiki math module + our current computer server being unable to cope. Adding more text and/or formulas to the Crown Sterling page may have adverse effects on loading. Bongolian (talk) 04:12, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Strathspey Crown

Looking at the subsidiaries of Strathspey Crown,[1] they seem to be at varying levels of bullshit. The least bullshitty one seems to be Evolus,[2] a neurotoxin (i.e., BoTox) beauty company that is actually listed on NASDAQ,[3] which is not saying much. Grant seems to have collected credulous people or fellow-scamsters to fill up these various companies to make it look like they have governing boards and might have actual products some day. Grant must have spent his time getting an MBA figuring out how to con people using entrepreneur-speak. What is the likely actual aim of all this? My guess is to con venture capitalists. It all looks so slick (high quality website design) until one looks under the hood. Venture capitalists expect vaporware to some extent, so who knows it might be working. Bongolian (talk) 20:55, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Among other things, Grant likes to think of himself as a serial entrepreneur. Grifting is never risk-free: it helps to have multiple revenue streams in case one of them dries up. But yes, the consensus among infosec Twitter leaned towards investment fraud. That would also be along the lines of using the crypto currency as a penny stock. The reason it doesn't have to be more complicated than that, is, there's also an entire other side of the Grant's grifts that are

• BS documentaries offered on Gaia (streaming site) (Trailer on YouTube)
• Grant's own courses
• CPAK, some ancient knowledge preservation flat-earth-like venue and closely related to that,
• Resonance "Science" Foundation led by Grant's buddy Nassim Haramein
• Books

So basically a buffet of new-age woo for chumps, that lures in a ton of easy marks (uneducated, wealthy, bored, primed to believe in conspiracies) for the investment fraud. It might also help to know where Grant is coming from. Also this. Those two present quite an interesting set of allegations if you want to dive in. -Nomoresecrets (talk) 11:24, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, Grant's worth an article of his own here. I looked at one of his patents, one of the intraocular ones — fairly frightening given the history of such devices[4] — patent trolling would be benign by comparison to implementation by this guy. Bongolian (talk) 21:20, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Sister Project?

Are you aware of this (https://quackers.blog/2024/01/29/is-orion-by-crown-sterling-legit-nope/) blog? They appear to have a social media account in https://ioc.exchange/@quackers -Anon ^{— Unsigned, by: 2001:67c:6ec:203:192:42:116:183 / talk / contribs}

That was an excellent read! Lot's of good stuff there to cite. Thanks for sharing! Nomoresecrets (talk) 02:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Possible Misunderstanding of Crown Sterling's Awful Cryptography

I could be mistaken, but this existing text may be in error:

"What they fail to take into account is, as the group grows into e.g. 3,000 members, every time a member joins, all 3,000 members will need a new key, preferably right away."

What I take away from page 4 of the whitepaper is that the session key for a given group chat is generated when the chat is created, and never rotated. Therefore, the client used by the creator of the chat just needs to encrypt the existing key with a new user's public key and send that to them, because the key won't change for any existing users.

That would obviously be a truly amateur cryptographic system, but I think that would be keeping with the character of Crown Sterling's previous efforts. --2607:FB90:9A0C:88B3:185A:14FF:FEF6:1A30 (talk) 14:34, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

You are right in that if there is no key rotation whatsoever, there is no overhead. The text was intended to bore down into the implementation details of the planned key rotation which they incorrectly expect to "not be a problem, as it's performed only once for each member". It's not at all clear what "only once for each member" means. Proper forward secrecy always has a re-key interval, and it's never "only once". Their downplay of the issue is thus as vague as it is unprofessional.

End-to-end encryption exists to prevent everyone, especially the company staff from gaining access to the communication. Suppose a Crown Sterling team member who has access to ciphertexts in transit (it's a centralized service, no matter what they claim) is kicked from some group. Unless re-keying is done for the entire group, the kicked member could continue to use the key their client had in its memory, to decrypt any future ciphertexts of the group. Proper security design for confidentiality thus requires key rotation for the entire group any time the member list changes. If this is managed by the client of the group owner, it's going to be up to them to perform new key exchanges with every group member.

The article is now more specific about the context. Nomoresecrets (talk) 00:20, 14 June 2024 (UTC)