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

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

On decentralizing prediction markets and order books Clark et al., 13th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2014 This is the last of five papers in the ACM Queue Research for Practice series on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts .' It serves as a good example of repurposing block chains as a foundation ... Continue Reading