Archive of posts filed under the Bitcoin category.

Monumental Investigative Work of 154 Journalists in 47 Countries

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More than 100,000 individuals who have dissimulated their money have been reported to the competent authorities. This is responsible, selective disclosure. Not everything is disclosed. A small glimpse can be found here Can technology help? YES. Potentially blockchain technology and fancy cryptography could propose some solutions. Basically they may render regulation, transparency and accounting rules possible to enforce …

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The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?

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A wind of change is blowing inside the bitcoin community. For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the …

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Imitation Game Movie – Is A Single Fact Related By This Movie Actually True?

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Dr Sue Black [UCL, saving the Bletchley Park activist] explains how much the true story of breaking Enigma during the WW2 is not at all what the movie shows us, and explains that though so many things in the movie are just totally historically inaccurate,  it would be somewhat very difficult to tell the real story …

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Speculation About The New Theft – 5 Million Dollars Stolen

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Nobody yet knows how 5 million of dollars in bitcoins were stolen from bitstamp (reported on 5 Jan 2015).  One expert report by Ferrin can be found here, however it is not clear if anybody knows at all HOW these bitcoins have been stolen. The bitcoin address of the thief is also known. Possibly bitcoin …

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Now At Least 200,000 USD Stolen From Blockchain.Info Wallets

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It appears that at least 100,000 USD were recently stolen from Blockchain.info wallets. Then a lot more was stolen again as reported on 15 Dec. Let us try to get make sure that we understand these events properly. Historical Background Bad random events in the blockchain have been known since January 2013. We have written on this …

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Block Withholding Attacks – Recent Research

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In a recent paper, Ittay Eyal from Cornell University takes the block withholding attacks to the next level. Very interesting work. We are going to decrypt and clarify a few things regarding this paper and how it relates to other previously published works (in particular our paper). The Invention of Block Withholding The danger of a block …

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Can Bitcoin Users Hope To Remain Anonymous

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There is very little hope. Here is the latest revision (November 2014) of the recent paper this topic (May 2014) which explains how anyone can link seemingly anonymous bitcoin accounts to IP addresses. These recent de-anonymization techniques can be easily implemented, and are also expected to distinguish between different users are sharing the same IP address and …

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More Bad Randoms In Bitcoin Blockchain

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Bad random events are still happening in the bitcoin blockchain, such events are observed on a regular basis. They are probably due to some yet unpatched software (cf. section Mitigation Points here). Here is the latest such event at the moment of writing, it has occurred on 29 November 2014, see here. Two different bitcoin …

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Regin Malware Watches Cryptographers Among Other High Profile Targets

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Regin is a highly targetted malware designed to watch over just a handful of targets, with only around 100 infections uncovered since 2008, including the famous cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater. It entails “a degree of technical competence rarely seen,” according to Symantec. Targeted Surveillance Known targets are government bodies, banks, small businesses and academics. Quisquater have been …

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Saving Bitcoin From Destruction

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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 …

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