Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin Ben-Sasson et al., 2014 Yesterday we saw that de-anonymising techniques can learn a lot about the true identities of participants in Bitcoin transactions. Ben-Sasson et al. point out that given this, Bitcoin could be considered significantly less private than traditional schemes: While users may employ many identities (or pseudonyms) … Continue reading Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin
Tag: Blockchain
Crypocurrencies and other applications of blockchain technology.
A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names Meiklejohn et al., USENIX ;login: 2013 This week we're going to be looking at the five papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice selections on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts.' These papers are chosen by Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the … Continue reading A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names
The Honey Badger of BFT protocols
The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols Miller et al. CCS 2016 The surprising success of cryptocurrencies (blockchains) has led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale, highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols for mission critical applications, such as financial transactions. In a ‘traditional’ distributed system consensus algorithm setting we assume a relatively … Continue reading The Honey Badger of BFT protocols
Misbehavior in Bitcoin: A Study of Double-Spending and Accountability
Misbehavior in Bitcoin: A Study of Double-Spending and Accountability - Karame et al. 2015 "Fast" transactions as it relates to Bitcoin are those that take around a minute or less. Buying virtual goods with immediate delivery / access, or using Bitcoin in a store for immediate exchange of goods are examples where it is hard … Continue reading Misbehavior in Bitcoin: A Study of Double-Spending and Accountability
Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains
Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains - Back et al. 2014 A very topical choice today. Last week a number of key players in the Bitcoin ecosystem published a paper (see link above) discussing a mechanism ('pegged sidechains') to allowed continued innovation and evolution of Bitcoin and related blockchain-based solutions. From the abstract: Since the … Continue reading Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains
Certificate Transparency
Certificate Transparency Laurie 2014 This is a paper about DNS, certificates, and how to build trust in Certificate Authorities. But beyond that application, it's also a paper about how to build a publicly verifiable append-only log (without using a blockchain) - and that's an idea that could have lots of potential applications. The core idea … Continue reading Certificate Transparency
the morning paper 