Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?
This week saw an exciting announcement about the experimental deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 in limited markets in the United States, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and parts of northern California, which will bring gigabit-per-second Internet speeds to many homes over the existing cable infrastructure. The potential for gigabit speeds over the existing cable networks bring hope that more consumers…
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Provisions: how Bitcoin exchanges can prove their solvency
Millions of Bitcoin users store their bitcoins with online exchanges (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken) which store bitcoins on their customers’ behalf. They present an interface that looks somewhat like an online bank, allowing users to log in and request payments to other users or withdrawals. For many users this approach makes a lot more sense than the traditional approach of storing private keys on your laptop or phone…
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“Private blockchain” is just a confusing name for a shared database
Banks and financial institutions seem to be all over the blockchain. It seems they agree with the Bitcoin community that the technology behind Bitcoin can provide an efficient platform for settlement and for issuing digital assets. Curiously, though, they seem to shy away from Bitcoin itself. Instead, they want something they have more control over and doesn’t…
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Bitcoin course available on Coursera; textbook is now official
Earlier this year we made our online course on Bitcoin publicly available — 11 video lectures and draft chapters of our textbook-in-progress, including exercises. The response has been very positive: numerous students have sent us thanks, comments, feedback, and a few error corrections. We’ve heard that our materials are being used in courses at a few…
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Does cloud mining make sense?
[Paul Ellenbogen is a second year Ph.D. student at Princeton who’s been looking into the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, among other topics. He’s a coauthor of our recent paper on Namecoin and namespaces. — Arvind Narayanan] Currently, if I wanted to mine Bitcoin I would need to buy specialized hardware, called application-specific integrated…
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Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary…
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An empirical study of Namecoin and lessons for decentralized namespace design
[Let’s welcome to Freedom to Tinker first-year grad student Miles Carlsten, who, with fellow first-years Harry Kalodner and Paul Ellenbogen, worked on a neat study of Namecoin. — Arvind Narayanan] Namecoin is a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that aims to create a secure decentralized namespace — that is, an online system that maps names to values, but without…
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The story behind the picture of Nick Szabo with other Bitcoin researchers and developers
Reddit seems to have discovered this picture of a group of 20 Bitcoin people having dinner, and the community seems intrigued by Nick Szabo’s public presence. It’s actually an old picture, from March 2014. I was the chief instigator of that event, so let me tell the story of how that amazing group of people happened…
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Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process
Joint post with Andrew Miller. Virtually unknown outside the Bitcoin community, a debate is raging about whether or not to increase the maximum size of Bitcoin blocks. Blocks are created in Bitcoin roughly once every ten minutes and are currently limited to a size of 1 megabyte, putting a limit on the rate at which…
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Bitcoin is a game within a game
In this series on Bitcoin and game theory, I’ve argued that Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition and shown how we’ve had blind spots for years in our theoretical understanding of mining strategy. In this post, I’ll get to the question of the discrepancy between theory and practice. As I pointed out, even though…