By Jonathan Laird Originally published on The Block, April 17, 2019 Quick Takes The creation of specialized mining hardware (ASIC miners) is a natural and expected development as the cryptocurrency space matures.Commodity hardware miners (such as GPUs) encourage Satoshi’s original vision of egalitarian mining but may increase the ease of 51% attacks due to widespread…
The Tongue-Tying Curse
Last Tuesday at 04:01:26 UTC, the Grin mainnet went live. Grin is a cryptocurrency, but unlike most, it is not based on the Bitcoin protocol. Instead, Grin uses Mimblewimble, which was first proposed in 2016. Mimblewimble is an important development because it improves both privacy and scalability, two concerns that are normally at odds with…
Bitcoin and the Problem of Privacy
In the conventional financial system, privacy depends on keeping transactions known only by the parties involved, but Satoshi Nakamoto’s design for Bitcoin depends on public transactions to prove the validity of the blockchain. In the original Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi writes, The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information…
A Bitcoin Retrospective
The Bitcoin network went live ten years ago today. In those very early days of Bitcoin, the nascent cryptocurrency was little more than a novelty. I don’t recall exactly when I learned of Bitcoin, but it was probably a couple years later. By that time, it was regarded as “magic Internet money,” a novelty that…
Bitcoin and Financial Censorship
On October 31, 2008, a user going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent a message to The Cryptography Mailing List about his new project, a fully peer-to-peer electronic cash system which he called Bitcoin. Though released to little fanfare, his white paper detailed a revolutionary system of distributed consensus. To the average Internet user, Satoshi’s…
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