[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
May 21, 2015 by
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
May 11, 2015 by
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 […]
The Error of Fast Tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
April 17, 2015 by
National media reported yesterday that a Congressional agreement has been reached on so-called “fast track” authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). This international agreement, having been negotiated under extreme secrecy by 12 countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, is supposed to be an “ambitious, next-generation, Asia-Pacific trade agreement that reflects […]
Bitcoin is a game within a game
April 17, 2015 by
In this series on Bitcoin and game theory, I’ve argued that Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition and shown how we’ve had blind spots for years in our theoretical understanding of mining strategy. In this post, I’ll get to the question of the discrepancy between theory and practice. As I pointed out, even though […]
