Navigating Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP: How Google Is Quietly Making Blockchains Searchable

In December, Kolinko met Day at a hackathon in Singapore. Within a month of the meeting, Kolinko was using Google’s tools to search for a smart contract feature called a “selfdestruct,” designed to limit a contract’s life span. Using his own software in conjunction with Day’s, Kolinko took 23 seconds to search 1.2 million smart contracts—something that would have taken hours before. The result: Almost 700 of them had left open a selfdestruct feature that would let anyone instantly kill the smart contract, whether that person was authorized or not. “In the past you couldn’t just easily check all the contracts that were using it,” Kolinko says. “This tool is both the most scary and most inspiring I’ve ever built.” 

That last sentence is quite true. I've always compared technology with nuclear energy. It could be used for good or ill. Researchers can gain great insights with these new tools and government agencies could do their own good and bad things with these tool.s You cannot succeed well in silicon valley without being on bed with the NSA and similar organizations to at least some extent. These kinds of developments actually make me more and more interested in https://grin-tech.org/ which was a new crypto released just a few weeks ago which shows a great deal of promise. 

Grin has no amounts and no addresses which makes data-mining far less useful. Other zero knowledge proofs can also come real handy as long as you are praying that nobody has cracked these algorithms in secret. Dash PrivateSend is another method that can trow off these blockchain search engine/data-mining projects as long as there is a high volume of mixed transactions which is yet to be achieved. Maybe you could help with that :-) 

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