March 19, 2024

Archives for May 2015

An empirical study of Namecoin and lessons for decentralized namespace design

[Let’s welcome to Freedom to Tinker first-year grad student Miles Carlsten, who, with fellow first-years Harry Kalodner and Paul Ellenbogen, worked on a neat study of Namecoin. — Arvind Narayanan] Namecoin is a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that aims to create a secure decentralized namespace — that is, an online system that maps names to values, but without […]

The story behind the picture of Nick Szabo with other Bitcoin researchers and developers

Reddit seems to have discovered this picture of a group of 20 Bitcoin people having dinner, and the community seems intrigued by Nick Szabo’s public presence. It’s actually an old picture, from March 2014. I was the chief instigator of that event, so let me tell the story of how that amazing group of people happened […]

Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process

Joint post with Andrew Miller. Virtually unknown outside the Bitcoin community, a debate is raging about whether or not to increase the maximum size of Bitcoin blocks. Blocks are created in Bitcoin roughly once every ten minutes and are currently limited to a size of 1 megabyte, putting a limit on the rate at which […]