Posts Tagged Bitcoin

July 2009 Mystery Solved

A year ago I analyzed a mining pattern that suggested a correlation between Satoshi computer and another computer mining at the same time. This relation had been highlighted to me by a another user in the forums (I don’t remember who) . From this correlation I conjectured that the same computer was mining both patterns […]

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How you will not uncover Satoshi

Computer forensics is the science of finding evidence in computers and digital documents, and when a hacker perform forensics, better be prepared for the unknown. Satoshi did many things in order to try to stay anonymous: he used Tor, he used anonymous e-mail servers, he did not disclose personal information in posts and probably he […]

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Theoretical and Practical Nonoutsourceable Puzzles

The fact that GHash.io has reached twice 51% of the Bitcoin hashing power this year has pushed scientist and alt-coin creators to find for other proof-of-work puzzles that discourage mining coalitions. Several months ago I read the foundations of Nonoutsourceable Puzzles as proposed by Andrew Miller, and now his paper (working with Elaine Shi, Jonathan […]

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NimbleCoin can be Bitcoin’s Best Friend

The debate of what will happen with Bitcoin hashing power when the reward is halved around August 2016 is starting to boil in the bitcointalk forums. Some questions have been risen about the security of CPU-friendly alt-coins, such as LiteCoin and DogeCoin in the long run. The problem was summarized in one sentence: If the […]

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DECOR+

In my previous post I presented the DECOR protocol. One of the assumptions I did was that the amount of coins each miner earned in competing blocks was approximately the same. This could be true for cryptocurrencies with never ending block subsidies (inflationary designs) because the block subsidy may be an order of magnitude higher […]

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Even faster block-chains with DECOR protocol

One of the most interesting papers ever written about the Bitcoin block-chain design is “Accelerating Bitcoin’s Transaction Processing” by Sompolinsky and Zohar. The paper presents the GHOST protocol which aims to achieve higher TPS securely by changing the way nodes decide which is the best chain fork. The authors try to reduce the block rate […]

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The Roads to Innovation in Cryptocurrencies

Once upon a time there was Bitcoin and nothing else. History was being written by Satoshi and a few illuminated minds that posted the most interesting ideas in the Bitcointalk forums and IRC channels. Almost every cryptocurrency idea I’ve heard of had a seed in some of these heated online discussions. During 2009 improving every […]

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SmartSPV – A better Simplified Payment Verification for Smartphones

NimbleCoin is a new cryptocurrency I’ll be hopefully launching soon. One of its nice features is that it uses the FastBlock5 protocol (a 5 seconds block interval) to achieve near instant payments. Because NimbleCoin also implements merged mining, each block header can be as large as 700 bytes (including Merkle branch and coinbase transaction). Yesterday […]

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The Private Automatic Miner Backbone Protocol (PAMBA)

The need for direct connection between the main miner pools or solo-miners (which is often called the miner backbone), was discussed several times in the forums and in this blog during the last two years.  A miner backbone provides not only benefits to the network as a whole, but benefits for those miners that establish […]

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Reawaken interest in Chain-Archeology

These days I saw some reawaken interest in searching for patterns in early mined blocks by Taras. Well, last month media circus around Dorian Satoshi may have contributed. I welcome Taras to the chain-archeology field, and I hope he does it responsibly. While reading his posts I remembered two chain-archeology techniques [1] that I planned […]

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