Posts Tagged Bitcoin
The people behind Bitcoin
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on April 1, 2014
A personal story Three years ago I was introduced to Bitcoin by a friend, and I was immediately fascinated by the protocol design. But since I’m a computer scientist and I was passionate for cryptography and security, the first thing I did was try to break Bitcoin. But the quality of source code was quite […]
The re-design of the Bitcoin block header
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on March 18, 2014
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 […]
Safe merged-mining and the Bitcoin’s Karma
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on February 20, 2014
In this post I will depart shortly from my classical technical viewpoint and enter the quicksands of opinions. But I’ll come back, don’t worry. The idea of the proof-of-work powered block-chain, while powerful, has lead us to a situation where many people sees Bitcoin mining as a wasteful and vicious activity. Articles against Bitcoin mining […]
25-second irreversible confirmations for instant payments
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on February 17, 2014
Recently there has been a race towards lower block intervals for PoW block-chain based cryptocurrencies. First there was Bitcoin with a 10 minute interval, then was LiteCoin using a 2.5 interval, then was DogeCoin with 1 minute, and then QuarkCoin with just 30 seconds. This reminds me a joke in a comedy movie where there […]
Changes in Ethereum scripting language
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on February 5, 2014
Today I read that Ethereum is abandoning a crypto-rich instruction set in favor of a reduced generic instruction set. This shocked me, because I liked Ethereum instruction set design just as it was. The main argument given by VButerin is that this change makes the instruction set more compatible with future cryptographic algorithms, by preferring […]
Refutation to Ron/Shamir paper on DPR/Satoshi link
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on November 26, 2013
As almost any other Bitcoiner I read the recently published paper authored by Ron Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir that suggests a link between Satoshi and the Dread Pirate Robets (DPR), the Silk Road black market operator. The paper states: “The Bitcoin community believes [9] that the vast majority of the early mining operations were […]
A mistery trip to the origin of Bitcoin, Ekoparty 2013 talk (Spanish)
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on October 31, 2013
For all who where unable to attend to the formidable Ekoparty Security conference, the video of my talk has been published. Both slides and video are in Spanish. Video (45 minutes) Slides (31 slides) Hope you enjoy it! (slides have a couple of images grabbed from the web. I apologize to the (unknown) […]
A disturbing idea: BitBanknotes
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on October 9, 2013
Prior the hack of bitcointalk.org, I received a personal message from user “btcusr” of bitcointalk asking me to take a look a thread he had started. Soon afterwards the site went down for maintenance, so I was unable to take a look. Today I did, and for my surprise I found one of those powerful […]
Satoshi’s Machine: One Mystery is solved and another one opens
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on September 4, 2013
When I was thinking about all the ideas that people posted in order to solve the mystery of the Satoshi LSB nonce, I tried to match the new explanations, such as the one given by Eyal0, with previous evidence. One of the mysteries about Satoshi mining hardware I originally posted is that it appears that […]
A new mystery about Satoshi hidden in the Bitcoin block-chain
Posted by SDLerner in Uncategorized on September 3, 2013
Some time ago, I received an e-mail from my friend Timo Hanke. If you don’t know Timo, then you should, because he is, apart from a respected mathematician and Bitcoin enthusiast, an excellent person. The e-mail suggested that I looked into the nonce field to see if I could find out the endianess of Satoshi’s […]
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