[Paul Ellenbogen is a second year Ph.D. student at Princeton who’s been looking into the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, among other topics. He’s a coauthor of our recent paper on Namecoin and namespaces. — Arvind Narayanan] Currently, if I wanted to mine Bitcoin I would need to buy specialized hardware, called application-specific integrated […]
The Chilling Effects of Confidentiality Creep
August 1, 2015 by
Today, North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory has a bill on his desk that would make it impossible for the public to find out what entities are supplying the chemical cocktail – the drugs – to be used for lethal injections in North Carolina. Known as the Restoring Proper Justice Act (the “Act”), it defines “confidential […]
Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
July 28, 2015 by
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary […]
Congress' Fast Track to Bad Law
June 12, 2015 by
Congress appears poised to pass Trade Promotion Authority, otherwise known as “fast track,” for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). If this happens, it will likely close the door to any possibility of meaningful public input about TPP’s scope and contours. That’s a major problem, as this “21st century trade agreement” encompassing around 800 million people in […]
