(this article was originally published in 2020 in the IOV Labs Research Publications. It is republished here with only minor updates to reflect new RSKIPs). In this article I argue that the 1/64 CALL gas reduction in EIP150 is problematic and I suggest Ethereum 2.0 implement the 1/64 CALL gas lock slightly differently as specified […]

We’re crossing the middle of 2021. This year promises to be one of the most exciting years in crypto since I learnt about Bitcoin in 2012. Just yesterday, a country declared Bitcoin legal tender! Yet this year will probably be remembered as one of the saddest years in this decades because of Covid19. Yet Covid19 […]

By Sergio Lerner. Something amazing happened to me. I was leaving a meeting to enter another, disappointed for not being able to gather time to write and preparing for the adrenaline rush that I get when entering a meeting without any notion of the subject in question, when the secretary approached and warned me that […]

Last month I published an article on RSK Labs’s blog on how merge-mining works on the RSK sidechain. In this short article, I will deepen[1] the issue of the security of merge-mining RSK, and show how RSK’s security has increased after the last network upgrade. Now RSK merge-mining security could reach a level of security […]

Synopsis: In this article I will discuss what we know about the early Bitcoin blocks. Also I will present a new strong argument that a single miner mined 22k blocks. Finally I’ll introduce satoshiblocks.info,  new website that shows a cool visualization of early blocks. The last time I wrote about Satoshi I thought it would be […]

Recently a fix to the Bitcoin Merkle tree design weakness in the RSK’s bridge was built by making invalid SPV proofs whose internal hashes are valid Bitcoin transaction. While this solves the problem, it is by no means a “clean” solution: it creates false-negative cases (with very low probability)  and it reduces verification efficiency. While […]

  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 disclosure process I learnt it was previously known by some prominent members of the Bitcoin Core team. Using this weakness an attacker […]