I'm a little surprised that anyone expected him to really eat his member, but the response to not eating it wasn't very surprising. This seems to be just part of his tactics to hype things and get public reaction for a desired outcome. To go on and say it was a ruse for adoption, knowing full well that it is the "model T" of blockchain tech, is a full on admission to dishonest tactics.

I guess the question is, what is the associated ruse to this "MITM isn't a thing", thing..? If there is a ruse at all, it's a bit hard to come to any solid conclusions here in my mind.

I learned a great deal about AES reading your analysis here regarding brute force attacks, and how it would take 6 million years to crack. It would have only been a guess for me, and if asked to guess, it wouldn't have been 6 million years. This is a pretty impressive number.

If Moore's law is still applicable today, (which I'm not so sure it is) and this current analysis is from 2012, then maybe it's about 1.5 million years with current tech? I'm not a professional in this field and I'm not even sure if Moore's law is applicable to this, but I'm guessing you probably know. Just something that came to mind while reading.

The Quantum computer topic regarding encryption is pretty interesting too. I watched some laborious videos on Quantum computers during a brief time when I was super tin foil hatting and thought maybe we were going to bring some crazy entities out of another dimension (who knows!) , and I'm just going off memory here, but I think these guys were saying an efficient Quantum computer could crack our best encryption inside of an hour, even minutes potentially.

If this is the case, (and It's hard to doubt Quantum physicists in their field..) it seems logical to assume that this tech will remain black-boxed until Quantum level solution for encryption becomes available. Negligence would mean severe economic issues, likely collapse, and we have enough issues in that area as it is.

The HSM's sound awesome. I've never heard of them before this post, and that is a truly remarkable idea you have. Hopefully you'll get some qualified people interested to assist in a project with you.

There are plenty of good practices that even non security professionals can employ to protect their sensitive information, and the less one spends time considering the implications not doing a little research and learning what they can do, the less surprised they should be in the event that something happens. DERPCOIN, definitely.. One example is Steem password. I always tell people, there is no need to store this on an internet connected device, you shouldn't be logging in with it, get it off your computer, put it somewhere, and forget about it unless you need it later.

Ok, this is getting a bit long. Congrats on your certification, and thanks for the shout out!