Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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Improve Connectivity in Rural Communities – Principle #9 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies
In my recent blog posts, I have been discussing ways that citizens can communicate with government officials through the Internet, social media, and wireless technology to solve problems in their communities and to effect public policy. Using technology for civic engagement, however, should not be limited to communications with elected or appointed government officials. One…
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Game Theory and Bitcoin
In light of the back-and-forth about the recent Eyal and Sirer (“ES”) paper about Bitcoin mining, I want to take a step back and talk about what a careful analysis of Bitcoin mining dynamics would look like. (Here are some previous posts if you need backstory: 1 2 3 4 5.) The key to a…
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Why the Cornell paper on Bitcoin mining is important
Joint post with Andrew Miller, University of Maryland. Bitcoin is broken, claims a new paper by Cornell researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer. No it isn’t, respond Bitcoiners. Yes it is, say the authors. Our own Ed Felten weighed in with a detailed analysis, refuting the paper’s claim that a coalition of…
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Bitcoin isn't so broken after all
There has been a lot of noise in the Bitcoin world this week about a new paper by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer (“ES” for short) of Cornell, which claims that Bitcoin mining is vulnerable to attack. In a companion blog post, Sirer says unequivocally that “bitcoin is broken.” Let me explain why I…
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Silk Road, Lavabit, and the Limits of Crypto
Yesterday we saw two stories that illustrate the limits of cryptography as a shield against government. In San Francisco, police arrested a man alleged to be Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), the operator of online drug market Silk Road. And in Alexandria, Virginia, a court unsealed documents revealing the tussle between the government and secure email…
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Annual report of FCC's Open Internet Advisory Committee
For the past year, I’ve been serving on the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee (OIAC), and chairing its mobile broadband working group. The OIAC just completed its first annual report (available here). The report gives an overview of the past year of work from four working groups (economic impacts, mobile broadband, specialized services, and transparency).…
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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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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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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…