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OpenTimestamps: Scalable, Trust-Minimized, Distributed Timestamping with Bitcoin
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 488 posts.
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It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
This is my short story on why it’s easier and cheaper to use old fashioned bank wires when you have to transfer money.
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Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
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Hard Forks
The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]
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Living Only on Bitcoins
I’ve been interested in BitCoin since the very beginning but, until now, I considered BTC some very nice cryptographic experiment with high potential but almos…
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Is Craig Wright?
Today there has been an explosion of media interest in the claim by Craig Wright that he is the identity behind the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. However, his blog post is rath…
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What Happened at the Satoshi Roundtable
Last weekend I attended the Satoshi Roundtable conference along with Charlie Lee and about 70 other members of the bitcoin community.
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My view on the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
In a previous post, I wrote that I believe the Blockchain has the potential to be as disruptive -- and...
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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin
I’ve been writing about the Bitcoin blocksize debate here at AVC (the only place I write and I’m hard core about that) for the past year. It’s a big deal. At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can […]
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Why is Bitcoin forking?
A tale of differing visions
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Bitcoin: A flawed currency with a useful application for the Eurozone (2014)
The responses of many to my post on Bitcoin reveal a powerful tendency to underestimate the ill-effects of deflation on a social economy. This tendency to underestimate deflation’s deleterious impact matters beyond debates on Bitcoin per se. For example, in Europe the incapacity of the European Central Bank (ECB) to…
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Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction – Part II
In the previous post , we have seen how elliptic curves over the real numbers can be used to define a group. Specifically, we have defined a rule for point addition : given three aligned points, their sum is zero ($P + Q + R = 0$). We have derived a geometric method and an algebraic method for computing point…
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Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorith...
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Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
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High Frequency Trading on the Coinbase Exchange
by Andrew Barisser