In an article by Forbes’s Nina Bambysheva on February 13th, 2021, Madars Virza’s paper “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin” and Tadge Dryja’s “The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments” were named as one of “The 10 Most Important Scientific White Papers In Development Of Cryptocurrencies.
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Intense interest in cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, and the Covid-19 pandemic have sparked debate among central banks on whether they should issue digital currencies of their own. Advocates argue that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, can make cross-border transactions easier, promote financial inclusion, and provide payment system stability. Here's how central bank digital currencies could become the future of digital finance.
Read MoreDigital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab Launches New Bitcoin Software and Security Effort with Industry Leaders
Thanks to millions of open source developer hours over the past 12 years, and a burgeoning and supportive ecosystem, Bitcoin is no longer an obscure cryptographic toy. It is now an open-source financial network that secures on the order of $1T of value.
As the use of Bitcoin grows, and as it becomes more deeply embedded into our societies, the security of the network must grow and strengthen alongside it. Yet, as a common good, there is no one single Bitcoin protector or guardian to take on this formidable task. By design, there is no central command. And while this presents significant logistical challenges, it is also the distinguishing feature perhaps most unique to Bitcoin: no central point of failure. Bitcoin's nearly-uninterrupted operation over the years is a testament to the power of decentralization…
The goal of Utreexo is to make running a full node easier, faster, and smaller, and while that’s more of an asymptote than a point on any curve, we’re getting there. Today we’ve released Utreexo demonstration 0.2, which pairs the Utreexo accumulator with a modified version of btcd(temporarily called utcd). Most of the utcd work was done by Calvin Kim, as Niklas Gögge and myself have been working on improving the accumulator and how it interacts with the bitcoin data structures. Calvin has written a post about the work as well.
This new release works more like a normal bitcoin node: it starts up, finds peers, and verifies the blockchain. There are still things it doesn’t have, like a mempool, or a way to deal with reorgs. (It currently deals with reorgs by crashing.)
Read MoreRe: Comments to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network on Requirements for Certain Transactions Involving Convertible Virtual Currency or Digital Assets
FinCEN Docket No. FINCEN-2020-0020, RIN 1506-AB47
January 4, 2021
DCI Director, Neha Narula and Patrick Murck (@virtuallylaw) submitted this comment on FinCEN's latest proposed rule. They explain this might limit policy choices for a future digital dollar, reduce market competition, and most importantly, that's not how addresses actually work.
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A new report from MIT, however, strongly argues against the idea of blockchain-based e-voting, largely on the basis that it will increase cybersecurity vulnerabilities that already exist, it fails meet the unique needs of voting in political elections and it adds more issues than it fixes.
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By Hannah Lang November 4, 2020 9:30 PM
In American Banker’s weekly podcast “Bank Shot”, Neha Narula was interviewed by Hannah Lang on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
Read MoreA Federal Reserve-issued digital dollar could speed up payments, expand financial access and reduce financial crime. But it also brings trade-offs that policymakers are only just beginning to consider.
There are many models for “money”--account based models and tokenized money dominate many conversations, but other pathways are breaking new ground as well, including new emoney solutions and conceptions of money as an infrastructure or platform that could support new financial applications and innovations. We talk on this panel about what’s likely--and possible.
Speakers - Andres Wolberg-Stok, Head of Strategy, Office of the CTO, Citi; Robert Bench, Assistant Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Patrick Murck (Moderator), Chief Legal Officer, Transparent; Jenny Cieplak (Moderator), Partner, Latham & Watkins LLP; Neha Narula, Director, MIT's Digital Currency Initiative; Dante Disparte, Vice Chair and Head of Policy & Communications, Libra Association
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Please join the CSIS Economics Program in partnership with the OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute for a virtual webinar. This event will feature keynote remarks from Brent McIntosh, Under Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury and Kenji Okamura, Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Finance to discuss recent digital currency developments and what they could mean for the future of the international financial and monetary systems. The keynote will be followed by an expert panel discussion to address key issues including:
The link between digital currency, cross-border payments infrastructure, and currency usage in the international financial and monetary systems.
Technology that supports digital currency and how it can meet the design requirements, specifically of central bank digital currency.
Opportunities and risks presented by digital currency to commercial banks and established payments providers.
FinTech offers unparalleled opportunities for financial inclusion, on both macro and micro scales. Today, payments are embedded in platforms in ways that will upend traditional commerce; crypto payments are creating new ecosystems of inclusivity between businesses and customers; and central banks are looking at digital currency to address inclusion on a national scale. This panel discussion will run the gamut of these exciting developments.
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“Despite the focus on operating in adversarial environments, cryptocurrencies have suffered a litany of security and privacy problems. Sometimes, these issues are resolved without much fanfare following a disclosure by the individual who found the hole. In other cases, they result in costly losses due to theft, exploits, unauthorized coin creation, and destruction. These experiences provide regular fodder for outrageous news headlines. In this article, we focus on the disclosure process itself, which presents unique challenges compared to other software projects.15 To illustrate, we examine some recent disclosures and discuss difficulties that have arisen…”
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DCI’s Tadge took part in an episode of “What Bitcoin Did" with host, Peter McCormick, discussing the fundamental and technical differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, scalability and use cases.
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On this week's Money Movement we're joined by Visa's Head of Crypto, Cuy Sheffield; Neha Narula, the Director of MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, an institute leading research and development in crypto, digital currency and now CBDC models; and Robert Bench, AVP at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, and a key contributor and collaborator on the future of digital currency with the Federal Reserve.
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One of our goals at the Digital Currency Initiative is to harden the security of cryptocurrency networks. Most users of cryptocurrency take the actual network protocol and all of its implementation — mining, pools, validation, messaging, and more — for granted, and aren’t necessarily aware of all the ways these mechanisms might be attacked or fail. For example, though mining pools are a huge part of Bitcoin’s network security, there isn’t any available public monitoring to make sure that mining pools are well-behaved. There isn’t even a standard way to look at what pool operators are doing or infrastructure to keep tabs on pool operators.
Read MoreDCI will be collaborating with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to build a hypothetical digital currency. We are hiring a software engineer and there will also be opportunities for MIT UROPs and graduate researchers.
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An article by Alyssa Hertig published on July 28th, 2020. coindesk.com
“The infrastructure propping up Bitcoin might become easier for anyone to spin up and run.
Lightning creator Tadge Dryja has been working on a new design for a lighter weight Bitcoin full node, about which he first wrote a paper in 2019. Last week, he and a team of coders released a first version of the Utreexo software as a part of MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), putting the idea of lighter nodes into working code.
Full Bitcoin nodes act like financial security systems, validating Bitcoin blockchain transactions and protecting users from being tricked into thinking they received money that they didn’t. But they take up a lot of computing space and are quickly growing in size.
Since these nodes are the most “trustless” way of using Bitcoin, developers have long been trying to make them easier to use. It’s one of Bitcoin’s nerdy “holy grails.”
Read MoreDCI Research Scientist Tadge Dryja released the Utreexo Demonstration today through a Medium post.
“I’m excited to announce the release of the first demonstration of Utreexo. Utreexo is a new scalability technology for Bitcoin, which can make Bitcoin nodes smaller and faster while keeping the same security and privacy as full nodes.”
Read MoreThe Bank of England released a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Discussion Paper on March 12th, 2020. The DCI curated a response, led by Rob Ali, which explored topics in the paper (June 12th, 2020)
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