The Ring of Gyges: investigating the future of criminal smart contracts Juels et al, CCS'16 The authors of this paper wrote it out of a concern for the potential abuse of smart contracts for criminal activities. And it does indeed demonstrate a number of ways smart contracts could facilitate crime. It's also though, another good … Continue reading The ring of Gyges: investigating the future of criminal smart contracts
Year: 2017
SmartPool: Practical decentralized mining
SmartPool: Practical decentralized pooled mining Luu et al., USENIX Security 2017 Say you wanted to implement a mining pool that didn't place power in the hands of centralized pool operators. If only there was some fully decentralised way of establishing trust and coordinating activities according to a policy, in which anyone could participate... Oh, wait, … Continue reading SmartPool: Practical decentralized mining
REM: Resource-efficient mining for blockchains
REM: Resource-efficient mining for blockchains Zhang et al., USENIX Security 2017 The proof-of-work (PoW) used in most blockchains could just as easily be called proof-of-wasted-energy. All that hashing serves no useful end beyond electing the next block in the chain. The combined energy waste is actually pretty staggering: PoWs serve no useful purpose beyond consensus … Continue reading REM: Resource-efficient mining for blockchains
Luck is hard to beat: the difficulty of sports prediction
Luck is hard to beat: the difficulty of sports prediction Aoki et al., KDD'17 You can build all the outcome prediction models you like, such as the strategic play model we looked at yesterday, but some events have a certain amount of inherent unpredictability. There have been empirical and theoretical studies showing that unpredictability cannot … Continue reading Luck is hard to beat: the difficulty of sports prediction
“The Leicester City fairytale?”: Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons
"The Leicester City Fairytale?" : Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons Ruiz et al., KDD'17 In England the cricket season is coming to a close and a new football (soccer) season is getting underway. Today's paper choice is a bit of fun from the recent KDD'17 … Continue reading “The Leicester City fairytale?”: Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons
Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons from a cryptocurrency lab
Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons and insights from a cryptocurrency lab Delmolino et al., 2015. This is an experience report from teaching a smart contract programming course to undergraduates at the University of Maryland, back in the Fall of 2014. Of course that's a very long time ago in the … Continue reading Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons from a cryptocurrency lab
Adding concurrency to smart contracts
Adding concurrency to smart contracts Dickerson et al., PODC'17 Yesterday we looked at how analogies from concurrent objects could help us understand smart contract behaviour. In today's paper choice from PODC'17 (which also has one Maurice Herlihy on the author list) we get to borrow some ideas from concurrent objects to increase the concurrency of … Continue reading Adding concurrency to smart contracts
A concurrent perspective on smart contracts
A concurrent perspective on smart contracts Sergey & Hobor, Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts, 2017 Maurice Herlihy gave a keynote on 'Blockchains and the future of distributed computing' at PODC'17. In his slides (I wasn't there to hear the talk in person), he recommends reading 'A concurrent perspective on smart contracts.' And here we are! … Continue reading A concurrent perspective on smart contracts
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation Crooks et al., PODC’17 This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of isolation levels, a topic we’ve looked at before and which contains quite a bit of complexity. The gold standard reference for understanding isolation is Adya’s Generalized isolation level definitions. Unlike the definitions … Continue reading Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness
Using chatbots against voice spam: analyzing Lenny's effectiveness Sahin et al., SOUPS'17 Act I, Scene I. Lenny is at home in his living room. The phone rings. Lenny: Hello, thi- this is Lenny! Telemarketer: Lenny, I'm looking for Mr. NameRedacted Lenny: Uh-- sso- sorry, I'b- I can barely hear you there? Telemarketer: homeowner Lenny: ye- … Continue reading Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness
the morning paper 