In this episode: Tadge Dryja, a research scientist at DCI who co-invented the Lightning Network. We chat about his current research (uTreeXO, a dynamic accumulator for Bitcoin state) and discuss non-fork ways to bootstrap upgrades to a network (a bridge node for uTreeXO).
Read MoreYou may not have heard of Vertcoin, a crypto project designed to curtail concentration in mining power in the interests of broad-based participation. But if you care about security, decentralization and open access for cryptocurrencies, then the questions raised by a recent breach of its blockchain will matter to you.
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By KLINT FINLEY 10.15.18 07:36 PM Wired.com
Full article here
Today at the WIRED25 Summit, Neha Narula and Alexis Ohanian talked about some of the ways blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology at the heart of bitcoin and other "cryptocurrencies," could press forward through the current slump and actually become useful.
Read MoreOne of the earliest-seen and most persistent problems with Bitcoin has been scalability. Bitcoin takes the idea of "be your own bank" quite literally, with every computer on the bitcoin network storing every account of every user who owns money in the system. In Bitcoin, this is stored as a collection of "Unspent transaction outputs", or "utxo"s, which are somewhat unintuitive, but provide privacy and efficiency benefits over the alternative "account" based model used in traditional finance.
Read MoreBy Thaddeus Dryja, Quanquan C. Liu and Sunoo Park
Static-Memory-Hard Functions, and Modeling the Cost of Space vs. Time was presented at the Cryptography Conference 2019, which is organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).
Read MoreDCI Bitcoin Core developer Cory Fields shares his experience disclosing a critical Bitcoin Cash vulnerability.
Read MoreThis paper by DCI Reserach Scientist Robleh Ali sets out a structure for a digital fiat currency system. The primary benefit of the cellular structure is that it lowers barriers to entry for payments by using trustless intermediation between cells in the system. The larger purpose of this structure is to create an open foundation for a decentralized financial system in which competition can thrive but which cannot be captured by private interests.
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This week our colleague Gary Gensler was profiled in The New York Times talking about how Ethereum and Ripple should be classified as securities. DCI director Neha Narula continues the conversation about how cryptocurrencies and tokens should be regulated.
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From the New York Times, Nathaniel Popper profiles DCI Senior Advisor Gary Gensler, former chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission ahead of his statements on the regulation of cryptocurrencies to be made at the Business of Blockchain Conference.
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The MIT Technology review interviews Robleh Ali, former manager of digital currency for the Bank of England, now research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, on why initial coin offerings are dangerous and how to make them more useful. From the piece:
What do you think are the main misconceptions about ICOs?
The problem with ICOs is they want to ride two horses. The use of the word “coin” implies that the tokens being sold are money. The phrase “initial coin offering” is deliberately evocative of “initial public offering,” which is about a company selling shares to the public. They want to ride the Bitcoin horse by saying, “We’re not a security—it’s just money,” but they also want to ride the “You’re buying into a future enterprise that will be worth a lot of money” concept that’s inherent in the sale of shares. That’s one of the big tensions with ICOs, that lack of clarity, and that’s something that needs to be fixed.
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Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, helps PBS NewsHour understand how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies work. Watch the video below or read the transcript interview with Neha, "This is how Bitcoin works."
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The dot-com bubble of the 1990s is popularly viewed as a period of crazy excess that ended with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth being destroyed. What’s less often discussed is how all the cheap capital of the boom years helped fund the infrastructure upon which the most important internet innovations would be built after the bubble burst.
Read MoreThis paper by Christian Catalini and Joshua Gans explores how entrepreneurs can use initial coin offerings — whereby they issue crypto tokens and commit to accept only those tokens as payment for future use of a digital platform — to fund venture start-up costs.
Read MoreAuditing and financial oversight are critical to proving institutions are complying with regulation. This paper presents zkLedger, the first system to protect ledger participants’ privacy and provide fast, provably correct auditing.
Read MoreSmart contracts are an often touted feature of cryptographic currency systems such as Bitcoin, but they have yet to see widespread financial use. In this paper, Tadge Dryja presents a solution he calls Discrete Log Contracts.
Read MoreIn The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping.
Read MoreChristian Catalini is one of the world's leading academics on the business and economics of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Here are a few of his publications.
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Gensler, former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), will teach graduate classes at MIT Sloan on public policy and the private sector, as well as on the functioning of global markets. He will also work with Media Lab Director Joi Ito, including as senior advisor to the Lab's Digital Currency Initiative and the Ethics and Governance of AI (Artificial Intelligence) project.
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