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 …
A Swiss Champion of Empty Promises The Swiss company Bitmine.CH has an appalling track record. They sell miners for cash, they sell hosting plans, they produce their ASIC and they are mining themselves in Iceland. However all this was funded with customer money obtained on repeated empty promises. They have let down a lot of customers, …
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have on 18 September 2014 ordered to suspend the activities of ButterFly Labs. Some details: They have taken between 20 and 50 million dollars in pre-orders. Took orders starting June 2012, by September 2013 more than 20,000 customers still not received their orders. Reportedly they have not delivered for 12 months …
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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In Section 6 of the celebrated original Satoshi paper on bitcoin we read that: “If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins”. And later we …
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 …
Our job is security engineering. We criticise some bad insecure or otherwise imperfect solutions and promote solutions which make them better, more robust, more secure, faster etc. We naively believe that we can improve crypto currencies. Can we? There is plenty of evidence that we can’t. Crypto currencies are subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process. Crypto …
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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 …
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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