By Tamar Berenblum and Aviv Zohar. A tale of our sudden unexpected Bitcoin wealth and the ensuing beaurocratic mess we had to resolve in order to sell it. This post was born when we acquired a small amount of Bitcoins for research purposes, which like most of the cryptocurrency market…

How Alice, Bob, and Charlie used Zero-Knowledge and Blockchains to launch The Global Sudoku Revolution. This post is inspired by two great papers that make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to a wide audience: [1] How to Explain Zero Knowledge Protocols to Your Children (Quisquater et. al.) [2] Cryptographic and Physical Zero-Knowledge…

How Auction Theory and Algorithmic Game Theory Can Improve Bitcoin’s Transaction Fee Mechanism In a new paper (pdf) that we (Ron Lavi, Or Sattath, and Aviv Zohar) just published online, we apply techniques from the field of Algorithmic Game Theory to Bitcoin’s fee market. …

Ethical dilemmas and economic problems surrounding the disclosure of vulnerabilities in cryptocurrencies. Any complicated piece of software is likely to contain bugs, some of which can be weaponized into harmful exploits and potentially even monetized to yield financial gains to attackers. Cryptocurrencies are complex systems themselves so it isn’t very…

A Fast and Scalable Distributed Ledger Protocol (by Yoad Lewenberg, Yonatan Sompolinsky, and Aviv Zohar) It is by now well known that the classic Bitcoin protocol laid down by Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t remain secure when block sizes are increased or block creation rates are sped up. …

Bitcoin has its own obscure terminology and inside jokes — nearly impenetrable to outsiders. The short story below is just the result of playing around with the terminology (probably due to some stories by Etgar Keret lingering on my mind). Whatever you do, don’t take it too seriously. The Contract “Here’s my…