Celebrating the publication of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary” by Eric S Raymond. (PDF)
On May 27th, 20 years ago, exposure of Linux Kernel, then a novelty as open source development, now ubiquitous.
Using Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts to Create a Distributed Securities Depository by Eric Wall and Gustaf Malm
“Summarized, this paper aims to:
• Provide an analysis of blockchain technology at its current state of development
• Address the possibilities of leveraging blockchain innovations in the securities market infrastructure
• Address the issues of balancing decentralized blockchain database structures within the financial industry to conform to regulatory policies
• Outline possible routes of adoption of blockchain technologies in the securities industry while addressing the challenges ahead
• Propose overarching blockchain design choices suitable for a securities depository
Additionally, this paper aims to describe designs for delivery versus payment in different blockchain paradigms.”
Gnosis is an Ethereum based platform designed for wisdom of the crowd applications.
Gnosis layers enable 3rd party applications targetting market predictions and Ethereum oracles.Continue reading
Blockstream, the leader in advanced blockchain technology and applied cryptography, today announced the availability of Confidential Assets, a new feature in its Elements blockchain platform
Andrew Poelstra, Adam Back, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, and Pieter Wuille
Summary Description
The CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (“BRR”) is a daily reference rate of the U.S. Dollar price of one bitcoin as of 4:00 p.m. London time. It is representative of the bitcoin trading activity on Constituent Exchanges and is geared towards resilience and replicability.Continue reading
Summary Description
The CME CF Bitcoin Real Time Index (“BRTI”) is a real time index of the U.S. Dollar price of one bitcoin. It is representative of current bids and offers of market participants to buy or sell bitcoin on Constituent Exchanges. It is geared towards timeliness and represents an unbiased estimator of the instantaneous bitcoin price.Continue reading
Lumino Transaction Compression Protocol (LTCP)
by Sergio Demian Lerner, Chief Scientist RSK Labs
“…The critical insight behind Lumino compression is delta compression of selected fields, from a previous referenced transaction and the aggregate signing of previous transactions, so previous signatures can be disposed. Delta compression is done by allowing each transaction to refer to a previous transaction from the same owner, which is used as a template. Any field can be overridden, and unmodified fields are copied intact.
Posted
“The possibilities of zkSNARKs are impressive, you can verify the correctness of computations without having to execute them and you will not even learn what was executed – just that it was done correctly. Unfortunately, most explanations of zkSNARKs resort to hand-waving at some point and thus they remain something “magical”, suggesting that only the most enlightened actually understand how and why (and if?) they work. The reality is that zkSNARKs can be reduced to four simple techniques and this blog post aims to explain them. Anyone who can understand how the RSA cryptosystem works, should also get a pretty good understanding of currently employed zkSNARKs. Let’s see if it will achieve its goal!Continue reading
Celebrating 80 years of Turing’s revolutionary paper “On computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” a great compilation ca be found in Jack Copeland edition of ‘The Essential Turing‘: a guide for Alan Turing’s writings on Turing Machines, Enigma decoding, Artificial Intelligence, and more.
The Monero v0.10.0 was recently released. It features major performance improvements, space savings gains for the blockchain, and the initial release of Ring Confedential Transactions, that are currently live on the testnet.
“Ring Confidential Transactions
Shen Noether, Adam Mackenzie and Monero Core Team
…a method of hiding transaction amounts in the strongly decentralized anonymous cryptocurrency Monero.Continue reading
Here’s one way to think about the differences between the Internet and the Blockchain. The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). Continue reading
Steem is a social media platform based on blockchain. Content puclished is rewarded by means of smart tokens.Continue reading
Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
(O’Reilly).
Copyright 2014 Andreas M. Antonopoulos, 978-1449374044.
This coming from Antonopolous, the evangelist himself, is defintely worth a closer study.
Book has a rather ‘for newbies’ opening chapters, but warms up into a hands-on sequence that coders may use as a guide to set up as a fully operational Bitcoin node.
The examples are illustrated in Python, C++ and using the command-line of a Unixlike operating system such as Linux or Mac OSX. All code snippets are available in the Github repository (…)
All the code snippets use real values and calculations where possible, so that you can build from example to example and see the same results in any code you write to calculate the same values. For example, the private keys and corresponding public keys and addresses are all real. The sample transactions, blocks and blockchain references have all
been introduced in the actual bitcoin blockchain and are part of the public ledger, so you can review them on any bitcoin system….
The Lightning Network is a proposed solution to bitcoin scalability, dependent upon the underlying technology of the blockchain. By using real Bitcoin/blockchain transactions and using its native smart-contract scripting language, it is possible to create a secure network of participants which are able to transact at high volume and high speed.
The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments
Joseph Poon, Thaddeus Dryja
Some introduction guides to Blockchain, DLT and the cryptocurrency environment:
Rootstock (RSK) – Bitcoin powered Smart Contracts
“…Rootstock (RSK), a smart-contract platform that incorporates a Turing Complete Virtual Machine to Bitcoin. It also provides other enhancement to the network such as faster transactions and better scalability, features that we also believe will enable new usage scenarios.Continue reading
Interledger is an open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers. Like routers on the Internet, connectors route packets of money across independent payment networks. The open architecture and minimal protocol enable interoperability for any value transfer system. Interledger is not tied to any one company, blockchain, or currency.
“A Protocol for Interledger Payments
Stefan Thomas & Evan SchwartzContinue reading