I have worked for several years in bitcoin community. In May 2014 I have published a paper in which I formulated the theory of programmed self-destruction of crypto currency. Few points about this My conclusion was that many crypto currencies were genetically programmed or bound to self-destruct. This is absolutely certain. Not because they were …
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10 bitcoins (nearly 4000 USD) is offered for help with breaks, cryptanalysis, security proofs, analysis or improvements relating to the CCT protocol which aims at making the amounts of bitcoin transactions confidential with a dedicated efficient zero-knowledge method. The timing is tight: the price expires on 20 of January. Additional cash prizes, …
A recent paper from September 2015 revisits a simple [well-known] attack in which a government agency manipulates elliptic curves under the assumption that there exists (a secret) method such that a certain proportion (say 1 in a million of 1 in a thousand) of curves are weak and breakable. No convincing method to create a weak …
According to BBC and many other sources, islamic state terrorists use a messaging app called Telegram to encrypt communications for groups of users. On the surface, Telegram developers seem to support high security standards: they have published the spec and API and funded in November 2014 a handsome 300,000 USD cash prize for cracking …
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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 …
A so called Bitcoin Generator Tool v.2.9 have been released today (Sat 3 Oct 2015) and already 260 downloads within a few hours! It is a ZIP file which claims that it performs full access on the Bitcoin central SQL database and allows one to add bitcoins to his account. Needless to say there is no such …
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20 million dollars have just been invested in BitFury (July 2015), totaling 60 million which this company has raised (source: coindesk). There was nothing like this for at least 5 months. On Mining Profitability I find it very surprising that people invest in bitcoin mining. Why? My [private] conjecture is as follows: mining …
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 …
Ground breaking research on insecurity of brainwallets by Ryan Castellucci was presented at DefCon 2015 on 7 August 2015: At least 733 BTC (about 200,000 USD) was at one time (more or less recently) exposed to immediate theft. Many very complex passwords such as “No need to worry, my accountant handles that” already cracked. A …
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A price increase in bitcoin was expected after the Greek crisis. HOWEVER. Greek economy is not that big and modern bitcoin market is nowadays driven primarily by China. There seem to be some permanent price difference on exchanges: like Chinese people are buying bitcoins against Chinese Yuan paying some 6% more, see here, and getting out US …