Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books
In a new paper to be presented next week at WEIS by Jeremy Clark, we discuss the challenges in designing truly decentralized prediction markets and order books. Prediction markets allow market participants to trade shares in future events (such as “Will the USA advance to the knockout stage of the 2014 World Cup?”) and turn…
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Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action…
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Increasing Civic Engagement Requires Understanding Why People Have Chosen Not to Participate
Last month, I was a poll watcher for the mayoral primary in Washington, DC. My duties were to monitor several polling places to confirm that each Precinct Captain was ensuring that the City’s election laws were being followed on site; in particular, that everyone who believed that they were qualified to vote was able to…
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Threshold signatures and Bitcoin wallet security: A menu of options
Before Bitcoin can mature as a currency, the security of wallets must be improved. Previously, I motivated the need for sharing Bitcoin wallets using threshold signatures as a means to greatly increase their resilience to theft. For corporate users, threshold signatures enable cryptographically secure access control. For individuals, threshold signatures can be used to build…
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The importance of anonymous cryptocurrencies
Recently I was part of a collaboration on Mixcoin, a set of proposals for improving Bitcoin’s anonymity. A natural question to ask is: why do this research? Before I address that, an even more basic question is whether or not Bitcoin is already anonymous. You may have seen back-and-forth arguments on this question. So which…
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Bitcoin hacks and thefts: The underlying reason
Emin Gün Sirer has a fascinating post about how the use of NoSQL caused technical failures that led to the demise of Bitcoin exchanges Flexcoin and Poloniex. But these are only the latest in a long line of hacks of exchanges, other services, and individuals; a wide variety of bugs have been implicated. This suggests…
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Historic E.U. Net Neutrality Win Shows Maturing Digital Rights Advocacy
After a 5-year long campaign by European and U.S. digital rights NGOs, today the European Parliament turned a dubious Commission proposal on its head to safeguard the principle of net neutrality. It’s a historic win, and all over the news. It also shows how digital rights advocacy is maturing.
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New research: Better wallet security for Bitcoin
[UPDATE (April 3, 2014): We’ve found an error in our paper. In the threshold signature scheme that we used, there are restrictions on the threshold value. In particular if the key is shared over a degree t polynomial, then 2t+1 players (not t+1) are required to to construct a signature. We thought that this could…
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Why Dorian Nakamoto Probably Isn't Satoshi
When Newsweek published its cover story last week claiming to have identified the creator of Bitcoin, I tweeted that I was reserving judgment on their claim, pending more evidence. At this point it looks like they don’t have more evidence to show us—and that Newsweek is probably wrong.
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Are User Identification Networks the Future of Commercial Bitcoin Transactions?
With 12.3 million bitcoins mined to date, the total value of bitcoins has reached $9.975 billion US dollars. While this may pale in comparison to the $1.23 trillion US dollars in circulation, the use of bitcoins in commerce is gaining traction. With this traction the potential exists to link users’ identities with their public bitcoin…