At a technical level, the Bitcoin protocol is a clever solution to the consensus problem in computer science. The idea of consensus is very general — a number of participants together execute a computation to come to agreement about the state of the world, or a subset of it that they’re interested in. Because of […]
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Why ASICs may be good for Bitcoin
December 12, 2014 by
Bitcoin mining is now almost exclusively performed by Bitcoin-specific ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). These chips are made by a few startup manufacturers and cannot be used for anything else besides mining Bitcoin or closely related cryptocurrencies [1]. Because they are somewhere between a thousand and a million times more efficient at mining Bitcoin than a […]
Bitcoin mining is NP-hard
October 27, 2014 by
This post is (mostly) a theoretical curiosity, but a discussion last week at CITP during our new course on Bitcoin led us to realize that being an optimal Bitcoin miner is in fact NP-hard. NP-hardness is a complexity classification used in computer science to describe many optimization problems for which we believe there is no algorithm […]
It’s time to bring Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies into the computer science curriculum
September 15, 2014 by
In the privacy technologies grad seminar that I taught last semester, Bitcoin proved to be the most popular topic among students. Two groups did very different and equally interesting final projects on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies; more on that below. More broadly, we’re seeing a huge demand for learning the computer science underlying Bitcoin, both at […]
Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
June 16, 2014 by
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action […]
