A Thinking Person's Guide to the Latest Bitcoin Drama

bitcoin segwit April 05, 2017 at 08:48 PM Emin Gün Sirer
My quick reaction to the latest salvo of shots fired in the war between Core developers and miners.

BitFury's Smallest-First Mining Is Bad For Bitcoin

bitcoin mining February 27, 2017 at 10:33 AM Emin Gün Sirer
BitFury has been mining smallest-transactions-first. We argue why this is bad for Bitcoin.

The Greening of Blockchains

bitcoin green February 23, 2017 at 12:23 PM Phil Daian and Ari Juels
Blockchains are beginning to turn green. This post describes some of the IC3 research in this direction.

State of the Bitcoin Network

bitcoin measurement February 15, 2017 at 10:18 AM Adem Efe Gencer and Emin Gün Sirer
We characterize the state of the Bitcoin network as of this year, and discover that it has improved by 70% in terms of bandwidth compared to last year alone.

Miniature World: Measuring and Evaluating Blockchains

blockchain evaluation bitcoin emulation testbed February 10, 2017 at 10:10 AM Adem Efe Gencer and Emin Gün Sirer
Miniature world is an evaluation platform which provides a principled way of evaluating different blockchain proposals.

Will Cryptocurrencies Be Centrally Controlled? What Would Hamilton Do?

bitcoin sec ic3 January 09, 2017 at 08:42 AM Jim Ballingall
As regulators take a closer interest in cryptocurrencies, IC3 faculty weigh in on if and how they should be regulated.

Scaling Bitcoin with Secure Hardware

bitcoin lightning payment channels December 22, 2016 at 09:10 AM Joshua Lind, Ittay Eyal, Peter Pietzuch, and Emin Gün Sirer
We unveil a new technology for secure, high throughput, low latency Bitcoin transactions using secure hardware, on the current Bitcoin network.

Service-Oriented Sharding with Aspen

bitcoin aspen bitcoin-ng service-oriented sharding December 06, 2016 at 02:35 PM Adem Efe Gencer and Emin Gün Sirer
We introduce the first workable sharding solution for blockchains.

Outsourcing in Higher Ed Considered Harmful

security surveillance highered orgsync August 29, 2016 at 08:16 AM Emin Gün Sirer
I make the case that the current trend towards outsourcing functions out of universities to third-party providers constitutes a security vulnerability, and that progressive institutions need to resist this trend to fight large-scale surveillance operations.

ByzCoin: Securely Scaling Blockchains

bitcoin byzcoin blocksize August 04, 2016 at 12:57 PM Philipp Jovanovic
We introduce a novel consensus mechanism that greatly improves security, throughput, and transaction confirmation latency of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.