Viewing profile — avhwl

I had some fun formalizing + building an interactive science communication app around Hanson et al's Grabby Aliens model for the Fermi Paradox. I hope people enjoy.

>Can someone explain simply why it is supposed to be so hard to track ransomware bitcoin payments, if all bitcoin transactions are in a shared public ledger? Clearly, it's not. Thi…

If the private key was hashed, and they only had the hash, then they could not crack it. Hashing is not the same as encryption.

A "backdoor in bitcoin's hashing algorithm" would not help them recover a private key. "bitcoin's hashing algorithm" is, for PoW, SHA256. The only relevant break for PoW would be a…

Proof-of-Capacity schemes would incur ecological cost as well, replacing a constantly escalating energy demand for a constantly escalating rare-earth metal demand.

>Bitcoin can be hampered but not outright killed, at least not over night. A death by a thousand cuts is the most likely solution but by no means guarantees Victory. Ignoring polic…

One aspect of this is that it incentivizes Denial-of-Service attacks. It would allow any attacker to directly convert a DoS attack into money. Imagine that the 5 largest ISPs in th…

I think they really missed an opportunity by exclusively supporting AMD/Intel here. Would have been nice to have a competitive and relatively affordable POWER system- open hardware…

There are inherent benefits to large, centralized platforms. Users, especially content creators, desire a large network of users and excellent UX, both of which have typically been…

Agreed, the thread highlights some decent implementation issues but largely misses the design problems, both ones that were present in the whitepaper but fixed and ones that are st…

The original Bitcoin release (and whitepaper) made the mistake of reaching consensus by selecting the longest chain instead of the chain with the most accumulated work. The distinc…

This is an entertaining and important talk. Technology is not value-neutral, and insistence that it is is a larger meta-security issue in of itself.

Cool write-up. This is one of the things that interested me about the new T2 computers; having a secure boot process that loads every link in the boot chain using cryptographic sig…

Both Augur [0] and MakerDAO [1] have centralized points of failure that would allow the owners of the contracts that define the tokens to halt transfers, withdraw funds, or in the …