We live on a planet where new technology seems to be working against the vast majority of humans living on this planet, rather than helping us to live better. This is sometimes called “singularity”, and Tristan Harris, a former Google ethics guru has now joined a public crusade so that tech companies “stop exploiting our …
After 1 month of acute crisis the bitcoin network is finally operating more or less normally. Imagine that you went to a station in rush hour and it took you 1 month to get home due tube or rail network jamming. This is exactly what happened to bitcoin in the last 2-3 months, and which is …
Continue reading ‘Bitcoin Network Recovery – $40 Billion Of Self-Inflicted Damage’ »
Almost exactly 3 years after this, bitcoin network went down to less than 50% dominance, and has nearly lost its capacity to process payments normally. Bitcoin in Crisis This can be seen on the following graph for the last 12 months. The curve does not go down to zero anymore. It can no longer keep with …
There is a considerable controversy around whether investing in a balanced basket of cryptocoins is a good idea. Two serious sources show that this sort of investment enjoys steady growth without a lot of downturns, cf. DLT10 Index and a recent detailed study which concentrates on a shorter period with excellent returns since Jan 2016 (cf. also …
Continue reading ‘Controversy Around Profitability of AltCoin Investment’ »
Some work done at UCL regarding bitcoin and speed: HOW to crack bitcoin passwords at a very high speed: brainflayer cracker where we read that: “The bulk of Brainflayer was written by Ryan Castellucci. Nicolas Courtois and Guangyan Song contributed the code in ec_pubkey_fast.c which more than doubles the speed of public key computations compared with …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …