Submitted by Thomas on Fri, 06/28/2019 - 20:14
In the 90s, the UN thought a lot about e-commerce and the Internet. Unlike most, they had a place to start from.
(Warning: Hacked together reductionist allegorical history ahead.)
Submitted by Thomas on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 21:50
Submitted by Thomas on Sun, 03/25/2018 - 20:10
Here is, in the author’s opinion, the simplest smart contract we can write in Solidity that has any use as an agreement or contract.
Submitted by Thomas on Sun, 09/17/2017 - 19:38
A while ago I was in a group discussion about how to make gold a decentralised currency on the internet. Ultimately we couldn’t find a structure which accommodated decentralised issuance while remaining a fungible currency.
Submitted by Thomas on Thu, 01/26/2017 - 10:35
Like the much maligned GOTO statement, the private blockchain, as a means to data privacy or tighter governance, should be considered harmful. (Although like the GOTO statement, it might still sometimes be a lesser evil.)
Why? Because the security properties of blockchains (and many other distributed data structures) rely on all transactions being visible to all participants. Once a system has enough participants to be useful, at least one of those participants will have included a compromised device.
Submitted by Thomas on Mon, 05/30/2016 - 15:53
This is a proposed blockchain powered online privacy standard. It came from discussions I had with Simon Deane-Johns [our lawyer at Zopa and a contributor to the Midata initiative]. The nicer legal wording is to his credit; any design errors are to mine.
Submitted by Thomas on Mon, 03/21/2016 - 22:49
(I am going to assume the reader is a software developer who's interested in programmable blockchains. If you feel confused by smart contracts etc, go read
Programmable Blockchains in Context by Vinay Gupta, who explains them far better than I do!)
Submitted by Thomas on Sat, 01/16/2016 - 16:44
I gave a little talk on Ethereum at the Bitcoin Assembly at the Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg this year. Mostly because I was surprised not to see it covered. Not sure about my delivery, but people asked questions afterwards so I guess I didn't do to badly :-)
Submitted by Thomas on Sat, 01/16/2016 - 16:33
For everyone who's trying to work out how to pop a hash into the bitcoin blockchain.
Written with the help of this article and a lot of browsing the bitcoinj forums.
Submitted by Thomas on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 22:20
And it's not that frightening. The main reason to sit down and get a handle on your security is to
stop worrying about it. Almost all attacks in real-life involve following a single weak seam through an organisation. Not
zero-days, not brilliant ruses, no NSA, no black magic. Just twisting one small mistake into another. Take the
HBGary hack from a few years ago. HBGary was a high-end security consultancy in contact with both the NSA and Interpol. One of the founders literally wrote
the book on infecting Windows machines.
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