Month: February 2018

SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part II

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency Bonneau et al., IEEE Security and Privacy, 2015 Part 2 : modifications, extensions, anonymity. Here’s the map for what we’ll be talking about today. We’ll discuss considerations for modifying and/or upgrading the way Bitcoin works, the world of altcoins, and uses beyond cryptocurrency. We’ll also touch ... Continue Reading

OmniLedger: a secure, scale-out decentralized ledger via sharding

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments
OmniLedger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding Kokoris-Kogias et al., IEEE S&P 2018 OmniLedger makes a nice complement to Chainspace that we looked at yesterday. The two systems were developed independently at the same time. OmniLedger combines Visa levels of scalability (caution: the authors compare against the average Visa tps, the peak tps in ... Continue Reading

Quantum algorithms: an overview

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments
Quantum algorithms: an overview Montanaro,  npj Quantum Information 2016 This is a paper that Preskill cited in his keynote address (see yesterday’s post). It covers some of the same ground that we looked at yesterday, but also has some additional material and perspective of interest — and I’ll focus on those parts today. We’ll touch ... Continue Reading

Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments
Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer Shor, 1996 We’re sticking with the “Great moments in computing” series again today, and it’s the turn of Shor’s algorithm, the breakthrough work that showed it was possible to efficiently factor primes on a quantum computer (with all of the consequences for cryptography ... Continue Reading

Learning representations by back-propagating errors

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Learning representations by back-propagating errors Rumelhart et al., Nature, 1986 It’s another selection from Martonosi’s 2015 Princeton course on “Great moments in computing” today: Rumelhart’s classic 1986 paper on back-propagation. (Geoff Hinton is also listed among the authors). You’ve almost certainly come across back-propagation before of course, but there’s still a lot of pleasure to ... Continue Reading