Podcast: DCI's Neha Narula interviewed by Hari Sreenivasan for CNN's Amanpour
Podcast: DCI's Neha Narula interviewed by Hari Sreenivasan for CNN's Amanpour

“Republican Senator Mitt Romney and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy join Christiane Amanpour from Washington D.C. to discuss their bipartisan trip to the Middle East and the growing tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Bill Weld, the only Republican challenging President Trump in the 2020 election talks about why he decided to run. Our Hari Sreenivasan talks to Neha Narula, the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, about the future of cryptocurrencies.” Amanpour Podcast

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FeaturedAshley JacobsonNeha Narula
Cryptanalysis of Curl-P and Other Attacks on the IOTA Cryptocurrency

By Ethan Heilman (Boston Uni), Neha Narula (MIT Media Lab), Garrett Tanzer (Harvard), James Lovejoy (MIT Media Lab), Michael Colavita (Harvard), Madars Virza (MIT Media Lab), and Tadge Dryja (MIT Media Lab)

We present attacks on the cryptography formerly used in the IOTA blockchain, including under certain conditions the ability to forge signatures. We developed practical attacks on IOTA’s cryptographic hash function Curl-P-27, allowing us to quickly generate short colliding messages. These collisions work even for messages of the same length. Exploiting these weaknesses in Curl-P-27, we broke the EU-CMA security of the former IOTA Signature Scheme (ISS). Finally, we show that in a chosen-message setting we could forge signatures and multi-signatures of valid spending transactions (called bundles in IOTA).

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Featured, PapersNeha NarulaNeha Narula, Tadge Dryja, Madars Virza, James Lovejoy, IOTA, CSI, Security
Blockchain and the Value of Operational Transparency for Supply Chain Finance

by Jiri Chod (BU), Nikolaos Trikakis (MIT), Gerry Tsoukalas (Upenn Wharton), Henry Aspegren (MIT), and Mark Weber (MIT). Nominated for an award in the Journal of Management Science. Sept 15th, 2018

In this paper, we develop a new theory that shows signaling a firm's fundamental quality (e.g., its operational capabilities) to lenders through inventory transactions to be more efficient --- it leads to less costly operational distortions --- than signaling through loan requests, and we characterize how the efficiency gains depend on firm operational characteristics such as operating costs, market size, inventory salvage value and failure probability.

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PapersAshley Jacobsonb_verify, Supply Chain Finance, Blockchain
Knowledge @ Wharton's 'How a New Technology Can Disrupt the Global Supply Chain'

An interdisciplinary team from MIT, Wharton and Boston College has created a new blockchain-based system that has the potential to disrupt the global supply chain. Called ‘b_verify,’ the system is designed to help small and medium-size enterprises — especially those in developing nations — get financing from lenders at potentially better terms while mitigating warehouse deposit fraud. The system brings greater transparency to a key part of the supply chain, which can have a big impact on global trade financing. Bverify introduces a series of blockchain technology innovations tailored to facilitate supply chain finance and operations management.

Read the article here

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Articles, Working GroupsAshley Jacobsonb_verify, Global Supply Chain, working groups
MIT Technology Review and MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative Announce 2019 Business of Blockchain Conference on May 2
MIT Technology Review and MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative Announce 2019 Business of Blockchain Conference on May 2

Today, MIT Technology Review announced the third annual Business of Blockchain event, which will take place on May 2, 2019 at the MIT Media Lab. The event is held in collaboration with the Digital Currency Initiative, an MIT Media Lab research group focusing on cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology, and brings together industry leaders and pioneers in this emerging field to examine the technology, ethics, and impact of blockchains.

Read the Article here

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Articles, FeaturedAshley JacobsonBusiness of Blockchain, Digital Currency Initiative Conference, MIT Technology Review
DCI's Director interviewed for Fortune's latest article: 'Zcash Discloses Vulnerability That Could Have Allowed 'Infinite Counterfeit' Cryptocurrency'

On March 1 of last year, Ariel Gabizon was tidying up a presentation he was preparing to deliver the following day at a financial cryptography conference on the Caribbean island of Curaçao when he spotted a seemingly small mathematical mistake that could, he realized, jeopardize billions of dollars in capital.

Read the full article here

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Articles, FeaturedAshley Jacobsonzcash, Security, Neha Narula
"DCI Working Groups: the blockchain sandbox at MIT" On Medium by DCI's Alin Dragos

Our MIT motto, mens et manus, is a call-to-action to be more than mere technologists and to learn (by doing!) how to be thoughtful makers of a better world. The Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) Working Group Program creates a sandbox for interdisciplinary teams of students to hack on pressing topics in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Students from the Blockchain Lab will collaborate with instructors, companies and DCI to investigate uses of blockchain technology and how to integrate it into viable business models.

Read the full post on Medium

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Featured, Working GroupsAshley JacobsonBitcoin, cryptocurrency., Classes, Action Learning, working groups
Coindesk's 'This Scaling Tech Could Let You Sync Bitcoin Straight From Your Phone' using UTreeXO created by Tadge Dryja

“Maybe we don’t have to store everything ourselves.”

That’s Tadge Dryja, cryptocurrency research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, explaining the concept behind his bitcoin scaling solution, “utreexo.”

Based on an idea that has been pursued by developers for many years, utreexo seeks to streamline an aspect of bitcoin’s code that leads to heavy storage requirements over time.

Read the original article here

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Articles, FeaturedAshley JacobsonUtreexo, Tadge Dryja
Coindesk's 'Bitcoin at 10[years old]': From Fearing Bitcoin To Fixing Its Worst Problem: Tadge Dryja

A celebration of 10 years of Bitcoin features DCI's Tadge Dryja story:

““I thought I would go to jail.”

That’s why Tadge Dryja, one of two principal researchers who would go on to envision lightning – what has become arguably the most important innovation in the quest to bring bitcoin to the masses – kept his passion for the technology to himself when he first heard about it in 2011.”

Read the article on Coindesk here

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Articles, FeaturedAshley JacobsonTadge Dryja, Lightning Network