Cold storage is a technique to keep keys offline and inaccessible to attackers. It is used by most major Bitcoin exchanges, occasionally moving funds between a “hot” wallet (used to satisfy user withdrawals) and an offline “cold” wallet. Exchanges then…

Using computers to manage assets is not new. Indeed that’s a major reason computers were invented. What, then, makes Bitcoin and blockchains different?

An event (defined by the hash H) can be constrained to exist within a time window A < t < B by hashing H with the most recent block hash A in a blockchain, and incorporating them both into the next block B=hash(H,A,nonce). Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm also has a nonce and…

Charlie Brummitt asked me an interesting question the other day: “can bitcoin mining be changed so that the computations could simultaneously be used for science (e.g., protein folding, SETI)?”

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. - Bertrand Russell

Bitcoin has come a long way in seven+ years. Being open source software, it lends itself to communal comments and…