When hackers believed by the U.S. government to have been sponsored by the state of North Korea infiltrated Sony Pictures’ corporate network and leaked reams of sensitive documents, the act was quickly labeled an act of “cyberterrorism.” When hackers claiming to be affiliated with ISIS subsequently hijacked the YouTube and Twitter accounts of the U.S. […]
Consensus in Bitcoin: One system, many models
December 26, 2014 by
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 […]
On the Sony Pictures Security Breach
December 23, 2014 by
The recent security breach at Sony Pictures is one of the most embarrassing breaches ever, though not the most technically sophisticated. The incident raises lots of interesting questions about the current state of security and public policy.
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 […]
