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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So many times we have learned about cryptography and security the hard way. One of the key problems is ignoring the advice and warnings, which are plainly written in the current crypto literature. This without the slightest ambiguity, so that there is very little doubt about what a reasonable and professional security practice is. The Story …
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There is a wave of new powerful cryptographic attacks on bitcoin systems. There are several types of attacks: Attacks which use poor random number events. It has already happened hundreds of times in the bitcoin blockchain since 2012. Now there is a recent massive outbreak of such events. Here is a recent example from 1 Nov …
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The answer is: just accept to receive a regular payment with bitcoin core client v0.9.2.1. All your bitcoins may be lost! Here are the facts. Today we have done the following experience. I had my client synchronized and running on my laptop, then suddenly it hanged and I had to reboot it. Just few minutes before …
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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 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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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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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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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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