Bitslog

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, […]

As segwit has been merged by Bitcoin Core, and the block size increase seems it will never be merged, I perceive waters are calmer. Not because there is consensus, but because it feels there will never be. But ScalingBitcoin Milan conference is close, tomorrow precisely. So let’s work on other ways to expand Bitcoin without […]

A year ago I was hired by Eth Dev Ltd through Coinspect to perform a security audit on the Ethereum design. One of our findings was that the uncle reward strategy in Ethereum was weird, and could lead to miners abusing the uncle rewards to almost triple the money supply. We discovered this problem because […]

Is was Wednesday, March 26, 2014. It was a cold winter outside, but not inside an old building of the Princeton university campus. The room, full of people, was warm. I was standing in front of some of the brightest minds in Bitcoin: Andresen, Bonneau, Eyal, Maxwell, Miller, Gün Sirer, Szabo, Todd and Zooko, to name only a few. My talk was about “SPV Mining”, […]

Back in 2012 I thought a lot on a new cryptocurrency that could merge the concepts of transaction and block. Each transaction would carry a proof-of-work and reference one or more previous transactions. The resulting authenticated data structure would be a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) of transactions where each transaction “confirms” one or more previous […]

A year ago I proposed the DECOR protocol, a new rule for cryptocurrencies to reduce significantly the amount of orphan blocks and then allow block rate to be as high as one every 5 seconds, and at the same time it promised to address the problem of selfish mining. After one year, I’ve received very […]