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 […]

(This post is an updated re-post of a previous post in RSK blog) In a nutshell, storage rent is a fee users pay in order to have their accounts, contracts and memory live on the network at any time, so their data can be accessed fast and at a low cost. Storage rent does not fulfill any purpose in […]

I have a fixation with algorithm complexity. When I was young I was an early optimizer, and, I must admit, that didn’t help me much in dates. Today I occasionally code a sub-optimized algorithm when there is no need for high performance, but it stills bothers me when I do. When I review code, it […]

I will try to explain the relation between Segwit and AsicBoost, in both the covert and overt forms, in certain detail. I will also try to explain why a method was recently proposed to reduce the interference between covert-AsicBoost and some protocol improvements, by reducing the incentives for covert AsicBoost. The proposal makes covert AsicBoost more expensive, […]