The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have on 18 September 2014 ordered to suspend the activities of ButterFly Labs. Some details: They have taken between 20 and 50 million dollars in pre-orders. Took orders starting June 2012, by September 2013 more than 20,000 customers still not received their orders. Reportedly they have not delivered for 12 months …
It appears that Satoshi have convinced himself that bitcoin was secure or secure enough. In his paper he repeatedly claims that bitcoin is secure IF a certain assumption holds. What is the exact assumption of Satoshi? Knowing the assumption is crucial because if we have stated our assumption and bitcoin is later shown to be broken or …
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In Section 6 of the celebrated original Satoshi paper on bitcoin we read that: “If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins”. And later we …
Monetary technology solutions have existed for thousands of years. They are subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process which is NOT exactly what it seems. For centuries in this historical process there was always some sort of unique natural winner or a dominant curency. We had gold, USD and Euro and maybe sooner or later, the Chinese …
Our job is security engineering. We criticise some bad insecure or otherwise imperfect solutions and promote solutions which make them better, more robust, more secure, faster etc. We naively believe that we can improve crypto currencies. Can we? There is plenty of evidence that we can’t. Crypto currencies are subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process. Crypto …
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A new crypto currency and decentralized exchange platform STELLAR has been launched on 31 July 2014. It is run as a non-profit. It was created by Stripe CEO Collison and Ripple co-founder McCaleb. It has received $3 million in initial funding from Stripe. Some good points about Stellar: Non-profit: some people say that Stellar is …
What do we stand for? The answer is quite simple: threats and attacks needs to be anticipated and protections must be built pro-actively, in advance before something bad happens and it is maybe too late. The golden standard in information security is: “it’s always better to assume the worst” because “when the unexpected happens, you’ll be glad …
Post in the series “bitcoin mistaken claim of the month”. Bitcoin Wiki and 51% I have today looked at the official Bitcoin wiki which is there to “document [bitcoin] problems openly” and provide an open forum with “loads of discussion about bitcoin’s problems” according to an official and highly respected source. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses I have checked and …
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The Ripple Voting Mechanism In September 2014, Ripple has released a white paper which described their method to achieve fast consensus in a peer network without expensive (and slow) proof of work. This is not entirely new and here is an older video about their system where transactions take only 5 seconds. In the white paper they …
The Problem One of the most serious issues in current bitcoin is the speed: how quickly transactions are approved and can be spent. In a recent video interview for the Financial Times, Dr. Courtois of UCL has said: “It’s not true that bitcoin is The Internet of Money. Bitcoin is The Horse Carriage of Money”. …
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