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 …
Bitcoin is widely believed to be an open source egalitarian system that was designed and fully specified by Satoshi and which is decentralized and governed by some sort of majority rule. The reality is very different. It isn’t any of these. Bitcoin is a murky shadowy system which obeys peculiar rules which nobody fully understands and …
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A critical vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute code on our computers. Immediate patching of everything is recommended. Some points: As bad as Heartbleed, some people say it is worse: severity 10/10. Existed for 22 years since 1992. Not only Unix Linux, MacOS etc. but also Windows. Yes, I have checked with my Cygwin installation …
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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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It is clear that bitcoin is in a serious crisis: It is somewhat NOT trying at all to solve the most obvious problems such as setting a roadmap to tackle increasing blockchain size and allowing bigger transaction size. The same problem applies to the appalling transaction speed which could be easily fixed in a variety of …
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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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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