- Auditing Crypto Wallets The recent NFT buzz has inspired more crypto-currency companies to venture into self-custody wallets. Although many early crypto proponents remain wary of “owning JPEGs”, NFTs have converted many crypto skeptics and present a new use case for smart contract platforms. This is the perfect time for engineers who have developed and audited self-custody wallets for […]
- Improving Tamper Evidence for Hardware Wallets Physical attacks on computing hardware are rare, but can have devastating impact. Physical tampering with a device can include adding or removing electronics to immediately exfiltrate data or to surreptitiously change the device’s behavior while the owner is using it post-tamper. Short of modification, an attacker can simply swap out one device for an identical […]
- Bitcoin Bear Markets To succeed in Bitcoin investment, you must weather the inevitable storms of volatility. The complete Bitcoin price graph is a dizzying moonshot, but new Bitcoin investors are often shocked by bear market phases they fail to psychologically or financially prepare for. We can’t predict how long future downturns will last, but we can learn from […]
- Bitcoin Investment for Beginners Often, my friends want to invest in Bitcoin, but are quickly overwhelmed by the details. I’d like to share my current thoughts on what works well for investment in Bitcoin for an average person. The basics of investment apply to Bitcoin. When you buy any asset, you need to establish a time horizon for how […]
- The Inevitability of Privacy in Lightning Networks Here’s a risky myth pervading the Bitcoin community: The Lightning Network model will inherently improve Bitcoin privacy. Off-chain transaction techniques move some transaction data from the indefinitely public blockchain record to other places. By this virtue, advocates conclude this will make sensitive data harder for privacy attackers to gather. Unfortunately, we do not have the […]
- Estimating Bitcoind’s Share of Blocks bitcoind is a daemon process that handles sending and receiving bitcoins for Bitcoin Core (formerly the “Satoshi client”) and its various forks (XT, Classic, Unlimited). Some people who use bitcoind to manage their funds use Bitcoin-Qt (sometimes also referred to as “Bitcoin Core”), a graphical interface for bitcoind available on many popular operating systems. Based on […]
- Bitcoin: Calculation Problems Key Concepts Crypto-economics is the study of the economic implications of engineering decisions in cryptographic consensus networks. Crypto-economics currently does not get enough attention in Bitcoin. Central planning of the protocol is the fastest way to alleviate problems, but introduces technical debt and makes the system less competitive. Planning Bitcoin’s Future As many writers have […]
- A Brief History of Bitcoin Forks This post was originally published at: https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/02/26/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-forks/ Content was co-authored by Peter Smith. TL;DR Summary Soft consensus forks render previously valid blocks invalid, and create security risks for non-upgrading nodes. Hard consensus forks render previously invalid blocks valid, and make non-upgrading nodes incompatible. Unplanned forks pose the greatest risk, and are generally caused by poorly […]
- RFC: Tool for tracking and visualizing Bitcoin address reuse I want to end address reuse in the Bitcoin blockchain. Today, I’m releasing source code for a tool that collects data about address reuse in the blockchain and visualizes it. I’m also releasing visualizations of the data for the first 200,000 blocks in the blockchain (up to September 22, 2012). This is my request for […]
- Bitcoin Visions and Conflicts of Interest Block size limit has been a hot topic lately. Some parties invested in Bitcoin want to raise the limit urgently, and others have demanded a wait-and-see approach. One of the side tangents that arose from this debate was developer conflicts of interest. This latter topic drew my interest in particular. While many technologists are averse […]
Money, Security, and Privacy for the 21st century.