Last week I participated on a panel about the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), a proposed computing and data resource for academic AI researchers. The NAIRR’s goal is to subsidize the spiraling costs of many types of AI research that have put them out of reach of most academic groups. My comments on the panel […]
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 […]
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 […]
