Researchers question what 'trustless' actually means for blockchain
Blockchain allegedly eliminates the need for trust — but how far is this notion actually true, or helpful? Crypto community members will likely be familiar with mantras such as "Don't trust, verify!" or the "law of code." Both refer to the promises of greater transparency and audibility and to a technology that offers to replace fallible, corruptible powerful actors with an actually functional rules-based order, secured through deterministic computation. The desire to dispense with the need to trust third-party actors is a mainstay with many cryptocurrency creators and users. Bitcoin....
Related News
Can blockchain micropayments be fast, decentralized and private? That question arguably forms the core of a new white paper penned by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that explores methods for bringing greater anonymity to off-blockchain micropayment networks. In the paper, researchers Matthew Green and Ian Miers explore privacy in the context of micropayment channels and outline a new scheme for blind off-chain lightweight transactions, or Bolt, which they believe will provide "private, instantaneous [and] anonymous payments". The proposal comes at a time when privacy....
Today, XCurrency has released a brand new trustless mesh network that looks to create revolutionary advancement in privacy, scalability and mobility. This is the final component of the company's Rev 2 privacy solution and is a single protocol with many possibilities for users and enthusiasts. This new service will allow any node to communicate on behalf of others, without having to trust forwarding nodes. The addition of XC's trustless ad hoc mesh networking comes just months after the company announced XMixer, where nodes can earn revenue for the trustless forwarding of transactions. It....
According to researchers, 74% of blockchain energy studies 'do not build upon existing theories.' According to a new preprint conducted by researchers at the Open Universiteit, University of California Berkley, and Radboud University, the vast majority of literature on blockchain energy use from both academic and everyday sources "lacks the scientific rigor expected from a mature scientific field." The report analyzed 128 scientific and open-source studies related to carbon emissions of blockchains such as Bitcoin.Researchers then found that an astonishing 34% of studies did not even....
The question of how to best increase the transaction processing capacity of the blockchain may be bitcoin's current crisis, but that isn't stopping researchers from working to solve more forward-looking issues. Held last weekend in Montreal, the inaugural Scaling Bitcoin marked the first major conference for developers, and as such, it featured a broad sampling of technical experts working on solutions to problems that may come to light as knowledge of blockchain technology advances. One of the more novel proposals to debut at the event was developed by Cornell post-doc student Ittay Eyal,....
With representatives from the Bitcoin Foundation currently meeting high-level officials from a number of US regulatory agencies, the topic of Bitcoin anonymity has once again taken center stage. In part as a deliberate effort to downplay Bitcoin's privacy aspects to regulators, in part as a result of recent revelations from Edward Snowden about the scope of the NSA's digital surveillance initiatives, and finally in part due to new research regarding the Bitcoin transaction graph itself, the current mood is that Bitcoin may be far less private than we thought. On August 14, researchers from....