Hacking, Distributed

Concurrency Improvements in HyperLevelDB

hyperleveldb leveldb June 18, 2014 at 11:00 AM Robert Escriva and Emin Gün Sirer

LevelDB is a popular data back end and in use at Google, Facebook, and many startups. In this article we discuss some concurrency improvements we've made to LevelDB as part of the HyperLevelDB project.

How A Mining Monopoly Can Attack Bitcoin

bitcoin security mining pools 51% June 16, 2014 at 02:35 PM Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the kinds of attacks that a Bitcoin mining monopoly can engage in. We clarify the space of attacks available to a Bitcoin mining monopoly.

It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

bitcoin security ghash 51% June 13, 2014 at 02:05 PM Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer

A Bitcoin mining pool, called GHash and operated by an anonymous entity called CEX.io, just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. This note describes what we should do about it.

Willy and Markus Do Not Prove Market Manipulation

bitcoin mt. gox May 27, 2014 at 12:10 PM Emin Gün Sirer

Recent leaks of Mt. Gox trading history has caused people to claim that massive market manipulation was taking place. I argue that there is no evidence for this.

What Can An Earthquake Teach Us About Database Design

mysql rdbms limits May 24, 2014 at 01:04 PM Emin Gün Sirer

What can we learn from an earthquake about the weaknesses of our IT infrastructure?

Setup HyperDex on AWS in 10 Minutes with Juju

hyperdex aws juju May 22, 2014 at 10:25 AM Robert Escriva

Juju is the new system from the folks at Canonical for automating cloud infrastructure tasks. It enables you to easily build and maintain your infrastructure with convenient command-line and web interfaces. In this article, we take a look at how to deploy HyperDex on AWS using Juju.