Joseph Bonneau

Except that then you have a list of common phrases that you can check. How many passpharses would be: "in god we trust" or "I love you". Figure out song titles and book titles, and you have a great list to check. See also: https://jbonneau.com/doc/BS12-USEC-passphrase_linguistics.pdf

If you are interested in this sort of analysis, I recommend reading into works by Joseph Bonneau: http://jbonneau.com/publications.html

I don't know if you're joking, or if the people downvoting you think that your idea isn't worth hearing, but it's actually a good idea (if we can look past our snobbishness about how over-hyped blockchain technology has become). Part of the threat model around malicious software updates requires that we implement reproducible builds and store the hashes of builds in a distributed permissionless append-only database. There are proposals like EthIKS: http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/B16b-BITCOIN-ethiks.pdf which implements public key transparency in the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts, and there are ideas for implementing the gossip feature of certificate transparency logs using blockchains: https://blog.okturtles.org/2015/03/certificate-transparency-on-blockch… Binary transparency can be thought of as just a special case of certificate transparency: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency

I am a bit confused by the reaction and commentary. ASICs are kind of the natural next step, so it is not surprising at all for any serious miner to go there. Hence, this appears as a too reactive really short term move and I wonder about the reasoning behind this. The number of units to break even is not that high -- here is one random example, a google search away, that seems right to me -- from what I can recall -- http://www.deepchip.com/downloads/fpga-vs-asic.pdf. A reasonable volume or am I missing something? Consider FPGAs as the efficient R&D step (due to its re-useability) towards an ASIC. ASIC will be generally faster and considerably more cost effective option per unit; plus more compact (so more units per space -- although there are other factors to account here). Usually you might end up with something less power hungry also, although I really doubt here one will see such a benefit. Hence Monero is going against this step as a way to mitigate centralization and the introduction of more market entry barriers. I think this is a bit late. For instance, there is a great incentive for miners to join pools -- see a bitcoin analysis http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/SBBR16-FC-mining_pool_reward_incentive_com…

There's a big difference between what people should do, and what people actually do. Research consistently shows that a large percentage of people reuse passwords across many sites. [1] http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/DBCBW14-NDSS-tangled_web.pdf

I found this to be a good overview paper. Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BMCNKF15-IEEESP-bitcoin.pdf

> By ensuring that no person could obtain an advantage over others, and by ensuring that anyone could join without exclusion, Satoshi created the Nash equilibrium to permit normally byzantine parties to enter and share safely in the definition of a shared network of contested assets. This is roughly true, although Nakamoto's original paper only proves this for the case where no single entity controls > 50% of the mining power in the network (weak incentive compatibility). Nakamoto argued it was also true for the case where a single entity controls > 50% of the mining power (strong incentive compatibility) but failed to prove this, instead providing a vague argument based on some difficult-to-prove assumptions. For more information, including an interesting theoretical attack based on this idea, see http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BFGKN14-bitcoin_bribery.pdf.

> I understand that the exchange can prove control of a certain amount of bitcoin, but how can they prove the amount of credit they have extended? By definition the credit is uncoupled from any blockchain, right? Solvency has two parts: Assets and liabilities. The 'prove control' is the assets part. The other side of a solvency proof is that they can, without breaking anyone's privacy) show that every user's account balance adds up to the sum of Bitcoin they control. In fact, they can prove solvency (that is, that each user has a balance and that they control at least the sum of distinct balances) without ever revealing the total amount they control or even how many accounts they have (other than a log(n)-ish lower bound). http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/DBBCB15-CCS-provisions.pdf But forget privacy for a moment: Imagine they were to publish a list of all accounts, all coins, signatures with all coins, and then timestamp that list with Bitcoin. Then the login JS that their site hands out (and which can be checked js pinning extensions) could at login make sure that that document checked out-- that the signatures were vaid, that the coins existed, that the totals summed up, that it was stampped in Bitcoin, and that your own balance was reflected in it. Presumably you see that that approach would essentially work. The only fanciness needed is making it communications efficient and private.

As seems to be a pattern with this blog, the article is a little too similar to existing materials to not have any citations. Here the tree starts at Wikipedia, bounces through Archive.org and ends up at a Danish blog with some interesting images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_loop http://web.archive.org/web/20070827183113/http://fy.chalmers.se/LISEBE… http://www.matematiksider.dk/vejgeometri.html Nothing is taken directly from the source material though. Edit: Just to expand a bit on calling it a pattern, this blog: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html uses a figure (and analysis) very reminiscent of A birthday present every eleven wallets? from here: http://www.jbonneau.com/publications.html