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The Private Blockchain Fallacy
In all the blockchain hype, a simple, yet self-refuting idea keeps popping up: a Private Blockchain .
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 33 posts.
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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
Last week, I flew from London to Tel Aviv. The man sitting to my right was a road warrior, just this side of a late-night bender in London. He was rocking an ostentatious pair of
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AI and Blockchain: An Introduction
At the kind invitation of Rob May and the Botchain team, I had the opportunity recently to keynote Brains and Chains, an interesting conference in New York expl
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Bitcoin is a Cult
The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is. As the years have gone on…
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How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
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Leaf-Node Weakness in Bitcoin Merkle Tree Design
This document describes a weakness in Bitcoin Design that reduces the security of SPV proofs and therefore SPV Wallets. The weakness was discovered by me on August 2017, but during the responsable…
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Basecoin, aka the Basis Protocol
See also Bitshares: Don’t walk away – run, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part II, and Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part III. UPDATE, 4/18/18 –…
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Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
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Dapps
A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]
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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
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Who and what is Coinhive?
Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices. This post looks at how Coinhive vaulted to the top of…
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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A Practical Introduction to Blockchain with Python
Adil Moujahid, Bridging Tech and Art
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How Ethereum can be stolen through DNS rebinding
The Post has been moved here
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Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson…
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Nothing Is Cheaper Than Proof of Work (2015)
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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IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn’t
IOTA is a cryptocurrency targeting the internet of things. It purports to be scalable, decentralized, and feeless. Unfortunately it is none of those things.
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My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher: I don’t see the point (yet)
I’ve spent the last 15 months researching the implications and possibilities of blockchains and related “distributed trust technologies” from a business and societal point of view…
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Turning Down a Blockchain Job Offer
I have recently received a job offer to work on a blockchain implementation. While the offer was very generous, I had to turn it down. In this post I want to collect the thoughts that went into my decision process leading to this conclusion.
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It can all go to zero
Perspective can be a useful thing. Cryptocurrencies have had a bad 24 hours. Last night Amy and I watched The Big Short for the second time. If you’ve never seen