Bitcoin Pointers
The Site;
The Paper;
Radical Transparency;
Ron & Shamir;
Developer Notes by Krzysztof Okupski;
research;
current price;
too ($/BitCoin);
The Block Chain,
Comm protocols;
better description;
Following the Money;
Considerable Technical Information;
‘FullNode’;
‘Fork’ News;
Controversy: BitCoin is Vulnerable,
BitCoin uses Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (FIPS 186 ECDSA);
X9.62;
Felten’s “BitCoin isn’t broken” note
My Bitcoin Notes
my note on ‘Broken’;
My “How it Works”;
how it works,
Bookkeeper’s Incentives,
Psychology of trust;
Mt. Gox Fraud,
Signing What?
Other Crypto Currencies
Bitcoin is a fascinating protocol.
It is an ingenious combination of crypto, hashing chains, incentives, game-theory and monetary policy.
It is a system built of several pieces that falls apart if any piece is missing.
Yet I get the impression that it is a stable game, and one that could plausibly serve as money.
It is intellectually satisfying.
It includes a monetary policy — a fixed amount of currency.
I try here to describe aspects of the protocol with emphasis on how to pay and the security architecture.
It is radically open.
Not only is there open source software to run it, the transactions are visible to all but the identities are nominally opaque.
With open transactions cluster analysis quickly identifies players, even if not by their real name.
Their bitcoin identity may be more relevant, however, than what is on their birth certificate.
See this.
Links: Wikipedia,
The Economist (remarkably technical!),
Brian Warner’s slides,
Variants
Eric Hughes was studying audible banks 10 years ago with crypto protocols involved.
I don’t recall what problems he was trying to solve; I think it was to avoid having to trust banks.
Bitcoin:
arstechnica;
Whenever you spend a Bitcoin, you cryptographically sign a statement saying that you have transferred the coin to a new owner and you identify the new owner by their public crypto key.
SegWit & fork
Swedish central bank explores blockchain;
Gravity claims