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

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

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

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