By Jonathan Laird Originally published on The Block, July 15, 2020 Quick takes: Usability is a critical requirement for cryptocurrency adoption.New technologies need to be easy enough to use that people will be willing to try them.Cryptocurrencies need to be designed for ease of use to Cryptocurrencies need to be designed as mission-critical systems with both…
Defining “Money” in the Digital Age
By Jonathan Laird Originally published on The Block, July 22, 2019 Quick Takes Economists generally describe money as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value.In order to perform those functions, money needs to be fungible (interchangeable, like how two five-dollar bills equal one ten) and inimitable (unable to be…
ASIC Resistance and the Demands of Decentralization
By Jonathan Laird Originally published on The Block, April 17, 2019 Quick Takes The creation of specialized mining hardware (ASIC miners) is a natural and expected development as the cryptocurrency space matures.Commodity hardware miners (such as GPUs) encourage Satoshi’s original vision of egalitarian mining but may increase the ease of 51% attacks due to widespread…
The Tongue-Tying Curse
Last Tuesday at 04:01:26 UTC, the Grin mainnet went live. Grin is a cryptocurrency, but unlike most, it is not based on the Bitcoin protocol. Instead, Grin uses Mimblewimble, which was first proposed in 2016. Mimblewimble is an important development because it improves both privacy and scalability, two concerns that are normally at odds with…
Bitcoin and the Problem of Privacy
In the conventional financial system, privacy depends on keeping transactions known only by the parties involved, but Satoshi Nakamoto’s design for Bitcoin depends on public transactions to prove the validity of the blockchain. In the original Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi writes, The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information…
A Bitcoin Retrospective
The Bitcoin network went live ten years ago today. In those very early days of Bitcoin, the nascent cryptocurrency was little more than a novelty. I don’t recall exactly when I learned of Bitcoin, but it was probably a couple years later. By that time, it was regarded as “magic Internet money,” a novelty that…
Bitcoin and Financial Censorship
On October 31, 2008, a user going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent a message to The Cryptography Mailing List about his new project, a fully peer-to-peer electronic cash system which he called Bitcoin. Though released to little fanfare, his white paper detailed a revolutionary system of distributed consensus. To the average Internet user, Satoshi’s…
Google Reverses Course on Recent Chrome Change
Following the last update to Google Chrome, signing in to any Google service will also sign the user in to the browser. In my last post, I explained why I oppose that change. Many others appear have similar thoughts, and Google announced today that the next Chrome update will return the option to remain signed…
Internet Browsers and User Choice
As a long-time Google Chrome user, I recently started switching back to Firefox. Firefox several years ago was a bit of a memory hog, so I started using Chrome, which eventually became my default browser. For privacy reasons, I recently started looking at other browsers, starting with Brave. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and…
Containing Your Data
In an effort to improve my online security, I recently started testing Firefox Multi-Account Containers. The concept is fairly simple. The browser can open websites in discrete containers, and sites opened in one container cannot see information in another container. For example, a social-media site opened in one container cannot gain tracking information from a…
-
Recent Posts
-
Archives
-
Meta