Month: June 2013
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Regulating Bitcoin
On Tuesday the State of California sent a letter to the Bitcoin Foundation, saying that the Foundation might be in violation of California’s law against running an unregistered money transmission business. The letter isn’t important in the grand scheme of things—it’s clear that the Bitcoin Foundation isn’t transmitting money—but it does raise the obvious question…
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Open-source Governance in Bitcoin
Josh Kroll, Ian Davey, and I have a new paper, The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries, from the Workshop on Economics of Information Security. Our paper looks at the dynamics of Bitcoin, how resilient it would be in the face of attacks, and how Bitcoin is governed. Today I…
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I Join the EFF and Others in Calling for Craigslist to Drop CFAA Claims
[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Craigslist is suing several companies that scrape data from Craigslist advertisements. These companies, like Padmapper and 3taps, repurpose the data in order to provide more useful ways of searching through the ads. I have written about this in earlier posts, “Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice,” and “A Response…
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The low-transaction-fee argument for Bitcoin is silly
A common argument advanced by Bitcoin proponents is that unlike banks and credit cards, Bitcoin has low (or even zero) transaction fees. The claim is a complete red herring, and in this post I’ll explain why. Let’s assume for the purposes of argument that Bitcoin transaction fees are, in fact, zero. There are small mining-related…
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On the Legal Importance of Viewing Genes as Code
The Supreme Court yesterday issued its opinion in the much–awaited Myriad case, which challenged the validity of patents on isolated human genes. The Court held that the isolated genetic sequences claimed in Myriad’s patents did not satisfy the inventive threshold for patentability, although the complementary DNA (cDNA) claimed in the patents did. One of the…
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Do Judges Play a Role After the NSA Call Records Have Been Collected?
Those who defend the NSA’s massive call records collection program point out that although the program allows indiscriminate data collection, it also meaningfully restricts data analysis and use. They note, in particular, this paragraph from Director of National Intelligence Clapper’s June 6, 2013, press release: By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from…
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51% foreign test doesn't protect Americans
One of the notable claims we have heard, in light of the Verizon / PRISM revelations, is that data extraction measures are calibrated to make sure that 51% or more of affected individuals are non-U.S. persons. As a U.S. person, I don’t find this at all reassuring. To see why, let’s think about the underlying…
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Revisiting the potential hazards of the 'Protect America' act
In light of recent news reports about NSA wiretapping of U.S. Internet communications, folks may be interested in some background on the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ provisions of the Protect America act, and the potential security risks such wiretapping systems can introduce. Here’s a 2007 article a group of us wrote entitled “Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards…
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Twenty-First Century Eavesdropping
Yesterday’s revelations about widespread government data collection led me to re-read my nine-post series on “Twenty-First Century Eavesdropping” from back in 2006. I was surprised to see how closely that discussion fit the current facts. Links to the 2006 posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
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How Consensus Drives Bitcoin
Josh Kroll, Ian Davey and I have a new paper on the dynamics of Bitcoin, which we’re going to release in a few days. This post is the first in a series exploring our paper’s analysis of why Bitcoin works and what could derail it. Consensus drives Bitcoin. Like any fiat currency (a currency not…