DCI Newsletter Issue #8 - Q3 2020

Hello,

Autumn is rolling in and the leaves are turning in Cambridge. MIT has welcomed a subset of researchers, students, and staff back on campus and is doing an excellent job testing and contact tracing (you can follow along with the results here if you’re interested). DCI continues to do our work remotely.

As we shared in the last special issue of our newsletter, the DCI is engaging in deep technical research to design, implement, and test central bank digital currency as a cryptographic platform, informed by user need and policy requirements. We are focused on evaluating the tradeoffs of different design choices on throughput, latency, security, privacy, and resiliency. We hope to bring together more stakeholders to provide input into these choices. See below for two interesting CBDC updates, on the ECB’s strategy and the status of the PBOC’s pilot, which has already processed 1.1B yuan.

Though we are spending more time on CBDC, we continue to dedicate significant effort to Bitcoin development and research, which is critical to informing our understanding of the risks and possibilities of digital money. We believe security in Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies broadly, is still critically under-resourced. Bugs, which can lead to vulnerabilities, affect Bitcoin at all levels of the stack, from the compiler (see the absolutely crazy memcmp gcc bug below) to incentives in mining pools. We are in the early stages of organizing a security roundtable for later in the fall -- please reach out if you’re interested.

Thanks as always for your curiosity and a special thank you to our funders for their support. Please let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or if we can help you in any way. We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks,
Neha