Happy Birthday Bitcoin, 10 Years!

On January 3rd we celebrate 10 years since bitcoin network started operation. Long live all crypto currencies, especially those which actually are real innovators, and bring new technology such as advanced crypto techniques to the market. Let a thousand crypto flowers bloom. P.S. It is also 20 years and 2 days after the introduction of …

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Blockchain Privacy – Part 2: Stealth Addresses

Privacy In Part 1 we covered why privacy is essential for widespread cryptocurrency adoption, and concluded that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum, or even ZCash is suitable for the task we’re wanting to solve: anonymity with efficiency. (Also the bonus property of needing no trusted setup)! COOL THING 1: STEALTH ADDRESSES The benefits of using stealth …

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UCL Code Breaking Competition Winners Announced

On the V-Day and the 71st anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we should remember how much the victory is owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. 2016 UCL Code Breaking Competition (part of GA18). On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2016 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners …

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A Short Human-Verifiable Proof that Craig Wright has Cheated the Press

Hours after his TV interview and his coming out in The Economist and elsewhere, I can confirm beyond reasonable doubt that Craig Wright (CW) has cheated us about his ability to sign messages with Satoshi’s private key. Here is a short executive summary of facts guaranteed to be 100% exact.This is also a short and …

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Is Satoshi Nakamoto Back?

Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also …

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Super Fast Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Microsoft have released a new free ECC library which is up to 5x faster than with the traditional elliptic curve P-256 (which was so far the most commonly used curve in practical applications) and a also up to 3x faster than a well-known alternative Curve25519.   Bitcoin elliptic curve belongs to the category “special therefore suspicious” and have been …

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Speed Matters

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 …

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NSA Plans To Retire Current Cryptography Standards

Breaking news: the cryptography that we all know and use, such AES-128, SHA-1 and SHA-256, RSA/DH, and the most commonly used elliptic curve P-256 (a.k.a. secp256r1) are NO LONGER wholeheartedly supported by the NSA. In fact most of these, if not all, are not quite recommended anymore. Until now and for the last 10+ years the NSA and the …

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UCL Code Breaking Competition Winners Announced

On the V-Day and the 70th anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we need to remember how much this victory was owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. UCL code breaking competition On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2015 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners are: Joint …

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Half of All Elliptic Curves Broken???

New paper in a series of how to solve Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem (ECDLP) in characteristic 2 with sub-exponential complexity. More results on this topic are expected. Remark: it seems to me that the main assumption about degree falls and solvability which is at the heart of this paper, is simply entirely wrong. Recent developments: …

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