Talks

The one arm crypto bandit is the third artwork of the distributed gallery. Each arm action generates a couple of new Ethereum private keys. If it ever happens that any of these private keys is already in used, its fund become immediately available to the user. Like a bandit, this machine therefore attempts to steal currencies through private keys collision.

Let’s note that there are almost as many private keys as atoms in the observable universe. Therefore, the risk of such a collision is close to zero: highly improbable but theoretically not impossible.

This bandit provides its user a concrete and funny experience of cryptography and a sensitive experience of the magnitude scales on which the blockchain security is based. You can’t even represent to yourself what 2^256 means or what’s 115 quattuorvigintillion means.

Once the machine displayed the public keys, private keys, and balance of each account, it randomly plays selected tracks taken from artworks of popular culture (punk rock refrain, movies quotes, video game sounds).

In case a collision happens, the machine plays a unique song that you will probably never hear…