On Forces of Self-Destruction in Bitcoin

I have worked for several years in bitcoin community. In May 2014 I have published a paper in which I formulated the theory of programmed self-destruction of crypto currency.   Few points about this My conclusion was that many crypto currencies were genetically programmed or bound to self-destruct. This is absolutely certain. Not because they were …

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Is Bitcoin Going to Split in Two?

Two prominent bitcoin gurus Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn decided to release their own software distribution of bitcoin and ALTER the specification of bitcoin! There will be a possibility to mine blocks with a new version number and new rules. This is meant to make bitcoin more democratic: larger blocks, more transactions per second, lower fees, wider …

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The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?

A wind of change is blowing inside the bitcoin community. For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the …

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Saving Bitcoin From Destruction

At last… there is a sensible solution proposed which should allow bitcoin to survive and thrive in the future. There is a new paper (22 October 2014) which revisits the concept of side chains and takes it to the new level. The idea of sidechains is not new, however, the problem is, was it ever taken …

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How To Upgrade The Bitcoin Elliptic Curve

All cryptographers understand the difference between a standard elliptic curve which everybody uses and recommends (say NIST, NSA, NATO, Microsoft, EMV bank cards etc) and a bizarre elliptic curve which nobody ever uses and which no responsible crypto engineer would recommend, except strangely in bitcoin. How to Upgrade It would be incredibly easy to upgrade, …

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Can Cryptographers Challenge Bitcoin?

A paper at the Financial Cryptography 2012 conference explained that Bitcoin is a system which “uses no fancy cryptography, and is by no means perfect”. Cryptography can do much better than that. Now what kind of bitcoin cryptographers are going to build? Most current proposals are about making anonymous unlinkable untraceable etc etc currency. This is a …

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Saving Bitcoin Peer Network From Destruction

Bitcoin peer network is in decline: number of network nodes has reached dangerously low levels. Some causes of this problem (and possible solutions) are: There is no monetary incentive whatsoever to run bitcoin nodes. Satoshi just forgot to create some monetary incentive. The number of peer nodes is only around 5,000 which is much less than the …

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Private Money, Bitcoin and Legal Questions

The IBM Dollar In 1994 Edward De Bono wrote a pamphlet called “The IBM Dollar”. Dr. de Bono wrote that he looked forward to a time when: “the successors to Bill Gates will have put the successors to Alan Greenspan out of business”, arguing in essence that it would be more efficient for companies to issue …

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Bitcoin Security and Cryptography: Reasons to Worry

Bitcoin has a toxic culture of NOT taking security and cryptography questions seriously ever. Being able to withstand expert criticism, champion best practices and anticipate the risks is crucial for any open source project. Unhappily we observe that: There isn’t a single academic or scientist at the bitcoin foundation and they don’t like being criticized on …

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Which Crypto Currency Will Win?

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 …

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