Archive for March, 2014

MinCen: A new protocol to achieve instant payments

Every day we discover new advantages of decentralized systems and peer-to-peer networks . Well designed P2P systems, provide greater resilience against attacks and accidental disruptions. Nevertheless decentralization comes with a price: consensus must be reached by voting or by proof-of-work, and both solutions tend to be slower than traditional centralized decisions. Instant payments requires instant […]

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The re-design of the Bitcoin block header

Today is the third time I find an attack to the way Bitcoin uses SHA-256 to perform mining. Two of the attacks belong to a new family of attacks that involve terribly technical details about the inner workings of SHA-256. These are attacks that may impact on Bitcoin probably not before 5 years, and they […]

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