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
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 850 posts.
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
Is he secretly the best young economist today?
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…
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"…
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…
Over the few last hours, a dozen news stories have broken about how an attacker attempted (and perhaps managed) to steal cryptocurrencies using a BGP leak.
Update: The content in the blog post below is no longer up to date. For more information please see our documentation. Many of today’s discussions around blockchain technology remind me of the classic Shimmer Floor Wax skit. According to Dan Aykroyd, Shimmer is a dessert topping. Gilda Radner claims that it is a floor…
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 –…
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…
Blockchain technology is ultimately a dual-edge technology that can be used to either support or supplant the law. This talk looks at the impact of blockchain technology of a variety of fields (finance, contracts, organizations, etc.), and the benefits and drawbacks of blockchain-based systems.
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 […]
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
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…
Two years ago, when we began taking on blockchain security engagements, there were no tools engineered for the work. No static analyzers, fuzzers, or reverse engineering tools for Ethereum. So, we invested significant time and expertise to create what we needed, adapt what we already had, and refine the work…
The technical specification and timeline for Lightning on Stellar, including working examples and an explanation of the new BUMP_SEQUENCE operation.
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.
Today, we at Lightning Labs are announcing the release of lnd 0.4-beta ! This release marks the 4th major release of lnd and the first Lightning mainnet beta, an important milestone. With this release, lnd has gained a considerable feature set, deeper cross-implementation compatibility, a new specialized wallet seed…