[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 […]
Why Your Netflix Traffic is Slow, and Why the Open Internet Order Won't (Necessarily) Make It Faster
March 25, 2015 by
The FCC recently released the Open Internet Order, which has much to say about “net neutrality” whether (and in what circumstances) an Internet service provider is permitted to prioritize traffic. I’ll leave more detailed thoughts on the order itself to future posts; in this post, I would like to clarify what seems to be a […]
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 […]
Why the Cornell paper on Bitcoin mining is important
November 9, 2013 by
Joint post with Andrew Miller, University of Maryland. Bitcoin is broken, claims a new paper by Cornell researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer. No it isn’t, respond Bitcoiners. Yes it is, say the authors. Our own Ed Felten weighed in with a detailed analysis, refuting the paper’s claim that a coalition of […]
Bitcoin isn't so broken after all
November 7, 2013 by
There has been a lot of noise in the Bitcoin world this week about a new paper by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer (“ES” for short) of Cornell, which claims that Bitcoin mining is vulnerable to attack. In a companion blog post, Sirer says unequivocally that “bitcoin is broken.” Let me explain why I […]
