When you send a Bitcoin transaction currently, it goes a little something like this: You acquire an address from your recipient, you pick out which unspent transaction outputs (or UTXOs, what the cool folks call “coins”) you want to send, and you sign a transaction with your private key that proves you authorized the spend. Source link
Colin Harper
57 posts
Gaming developers have begun integrating Bitcoin’s Lightning Network into their own games and existing titles to provide players with bitcoin payouts. The Lightning Network is a payment protocol that facilitates fast, near-feeless transactions on a network that operates with different rules than Bitcoin’s primary network. This in-game rewards economy offers everyday gamers a “stake” in the game and an opportunity to monetize their hobby, a privilege typically enjoyed only by the Goliaths of the professional esports industry. The end of the match was nothing special. From the outside, it looked like any other Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) esport match, until […]
Well, Dogecoin still is a meme – just a more expensive meme. And as the price rises from the depths, Dogecoin’s historically scattered development is rising with it. Take Dogecoin lead maintainer, Ross Nicoll, for example. His last commitment on Github came in October of 2019, but in the past two weeks he’s taken on a handful of new pull requests to make changes to the coin. As he and four other Dogecoin developers take up the keyboard in the name of the Shiba Inu-emblazoned memecoin (which is now worth over $9 billion at $0.07 a coin), they’re tasked with upgrading […]
Many of Bitcoin’s most active stakeholders have just about nailed down the activation method for Taproot, the Bitcoin software’s biggest upgrade in years. In a public meeting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Tuesday, Bitcoin developers, miners, business professionals and enthusiasts hashed out the specifics of how to package the Taproot upgrade into an update – and how to activate it once the code has been shipped. The most active of the 200 or so participants on the chat (mostly, but not all, developers) seemed to agree on the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that would be used to activate Taproot. To prep […]
Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade is (basically) a shoe-in as Bitcoin stakeholders figure out the best way to bring it online. Digital signatures are created from the private keys that control bitcoin wallets and are required to approve transactions. Taproot addresses will use Schnorr signatures, rather than Bitcoin’s current signature algorithm, the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA for short. In terms of data and processing, Schnorr signatures are smaller and faster than ECDSA signatures and also have the added benefit of being “linear,” which means Schnorr-based smart contracts can be optimized for functions that ECDSA signatures cannot. These differences have made […]
“Are you running the numbers?” This is what Bitcoin Core developer Andrew Chow is trying to find out in a new survey. Sponsored by a grant from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, Chow crafted the survey “to get answers from people who are not current users” about why they don’t run a Bitcoin Core full node, the wallet software which simultaneously keeps a record of Bitcoin’s transaction history and connects users to other peers in the network. Bitcoin full nodes are like servers so, if you’re not running your own to broadcast transactions to the wider network, then you’re relying on someone […]
When Elon Musk adds #Bitcoin to his Twitter bio, you know buying bitcoin is in vogue again. The cryptocurrency is pumping, perhaps not-too-coincidentally, as investing app Robinhood faces criticism for censoring stock and crypto trading in response to the Wall Street Bets saga. With Robinhood taking heat, Coinbase is basking in the glow. Coinbase’s popularity has climbed to its highest point since 2017, and it’s now the ninth-most downloaded application on Apple’s (AAPL) U.S. app store as well. The centralized exchange is one of the oldest in the game and has historically been the U.S.’ go-to option for buying bitcoin (BTC) […]
The Bitcoin community is debating the extent to which Bitcoin Core developers and maintainers should shoulder the symbolic burden of hosting its white paper, particularly when doing so could unnecessarily sap their time and finances. The question arose after the Bitcoin white paper was taken down from Bitcoincore.org, a canonical repository for the Bitcoin software and educational resources like Satoshi’s 10-page thesis, following legal threats of copyright infringement from nChain Chief Scientist Craig Wright. Wright, who has made a career of his claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, also helped to spawn the Bitcoin fork Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV). The Bitcoin […]
Interest in Bitcoin “double-spending” grew after recent news that the Bitcoin network processed the same bitcoin (BTC) in two transactions – the very “double-spending” scenario Bitcoin was specifically designed to prevent. Except the double-spend didn’t happen, at least not in the traditional sense. “The bitcoin ‘double-spend’ media headline has certainly spooked investors, but it’s a misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network operates. In this case, a chain re-organization of one block occurred, which is a fairly common occurrence,” Jason Lau, COO of OKCoin exchange, told CoinDesk. Put another way, no bitcoin was “double-spent” because no new coins were added to Bitcoin’s […]
Originally slated for Dec. 1, 2020, Bitcoin Core version 0.21.0 is now available for download, and includes a handful of notable changes to Bitcoin’s primary software implementation. Most notably, Bitcoin now supports Tor’s latest address format, Taproot’s code is now live for testing and Bitcoin Core finally gets manual fee setting. With bitcoin’s price pumping, these new features don’t grab headlines every day, but the improvements they make to the Bitcoin network’s privacy, tooling and complex transaction logic are building a stronger foundation as the cryptocurrency sees a new wave of investor interest. Taproot is one step closer The consensus rules for […]
Bitcoin miners representing roughly 91% of the network’s hashpower have demonstrated support for Bitcoin’s biggest upgrade in years, Taproot. These activation methods vary the length of time required and whether or not to include a measure that would force the upgrade through full nodes with a “user activated soft fork.” Given miner support, Bitcoin developers believe the upgrade should activate without issue, regardless of the specific proposal chosen. Now that most all major mining pools have pledged support for Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, all that’s left is the actual activation – but the members of Bitcoin’s open-source community have to pick the […]
After her website faced repeated domain name revocations, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has registered her website on the distributed domain names network Handshake. The pirated database of academic papers is now accessible directly through the service’s portals as well as through NextDNS, a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names. “The DNS is like a phonebook for the internet. The addresses in the phonebook are the server IP addresses. DNS was created to give IP addresses human-readable names so with our platform, you’re finding the IP address through Handshake, not through a certificate authority,” Namebase […]
Square Crypto’s latest grant will fund a Bitcoin developer’s work on software that could improve how mining collectives pool hash power. Pseudonymous developer Fi3 (@piccioneLibero2 on Twitter, or “free pigeon”) will receive an undisclosed sum to work on an implementation of Stratum V2, the next iteration of a Bitcoin mining protocol software developed by Braiins, a subsidiary of the Czech mining entity Slush Pool. “Square Crypto is excited to support the development of a high quality open-source implementation of Stratum v2,” Square Crypto lead Steve Lee said to CoinDesk. “This software benefits miners by maximizing their revenue and providing more freedom […]
Another crypto exchange has added support for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. U.K.-based CoinCorner debuted Lightning Network support for its users Tuesday. They can now deposit and withdraw bitcoin with the secondary network, a software stack that is built on top of Bitcoin’s core technology which facilitates cheap and fast transactions. “Lightning is the most decentralized and trustless scaling solution. We were always going to integrate Lightning but it was just a matter of timing and resource availability within the company,” Danny Scott, CEO of CoinCorner, told CoinDesk. CoinCorner introduced the payment method to its payment gateway, CoinCorner Checkout, in April of last […]
In an interesting consequence of Ripple Labs’ battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a Missouri man claiming to be a Coinbase client is suing the crypto exchange for selling the XRP token. In a complaint filed in the Northern District Court of California, Thomas C. Sandoval, the St. Louis County-based plaintiff, alleges Coinbase knowingly sold XRP as an unregistered security and gained commission on these sales. The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, argues Coinbase violated California’s unfair competition laws by “[gaining] an unwarranted competitive advantage over digital asset exchanges that only sold commodities.” “Coinbase sold a token called […]
Square Crypto is bankrolling its 8th designer grant to focus on Bitcoin’s user experience. This marks the Square offshoot’s 20th grant in support of Bitcoin development since it launched in the summer of 2019. Portuguese software designer Patrícia Estevão is Square Crypto’s most recent grant recipient. Per her grant proposal, the UX Designer will use the funding to research Bitcoin user experience, specifically why people use Bitcoin and what hurdles may obstruct their use. “I’m thrilled that I’ll finally be able to work on in-depth Bitcoin user research and I’m even more excited that it will have the clear purpose of […]
XRP is a digital currency which is issued and partly managed by Ripple Inc. a payment solutions company that also manages the RippleNet cross-border payment network. Ripple began selling XRP in 2012, though the company has turned its attention away from the digital currency and toward its cross-border payment network in recent years. How does Ripple work? Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, Ripple does not refer to a blockchain network with a native cryptocurrency asset. In fact, Ripple, the company, has a history of reframing how XRP fits into its business model, first embracing it as the fuel that powers its cross-border […]
Amiti Uttarwar opened Bitcoin’s code and froze. She was no stranger to programming languages. Studying information systems at Carnegie Mellon, she spent the first few years after graduation as full-stack developer for Silicon Valley startups. She was proficient in a half-dozen coding languages and had worked for five tech companies in her nascent career. She was working for Coinbase at the time. This article is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2020 – a list of impactful people in crypto chosen by readers and staff. The NFT of the art, by Osinachi, is available for auction at The Nifty Gateway, with 50% of […]
One of Ethereum’s most popular software wallets, MyEtherWallet is joining other crypto businesses by giving users access to Ethereum 2.0 staking. Through a partnership with node-hosting service Staked, MyEtherWallet now offers its browser and mobile wallet users the option to stake ETH tokens into the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain deposit contract, a smart contract that lays the foundations for Ethereum’s revamped blockchain infrastructure. MyEtherWallet “users need to stake 32 ETH to participate. Staked will run a validator node for them, making it easy for the users who don’t have the technical knowledge to participate, so no further action is required on […]
Yearn Finance is eyeing yet another merger with yet another food-themed DeFi project – only this time, the candidate has a larger market size than Yearn itself. Per a blog post authored by Yearn Finance creator Andre Cronje, the so-called decentralized finance protocol may fuse with SushiSwap, another automated market maker (AMM) that forked from UniSwap. In addition to combining technical features for market infrastructure, the merger would, among other things, combine both markets’ total value locked (TLV, a measure of the total assets deposited in these lending markets) into a single lending pool. Both protocols would also share developer resources […]
One of the crypto industry’s most popular exchanges is redoubling efforts to sweep U.S. users off its platform. As reported by Decrypt, Binance is threatening a hard deadline to herd U.S. users off its original exchange platform (not to be confused with Binance US, which is legally open to U.S. residents). Email notices sent to U.S. users give them 14 days to withdraw funds before Binance shutters their accounts for good. “As we constantly perform periodic sweeps of our existing controls, we noted that you are trying to access Binance while having identified yourself as a U.S. person. Please note that […]
The biggest update in Ethereum’s history will begin its first phase on Dec. 1. Per a tweet by ETH 2.0 Researcher Justin Drake, Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain’s launch has been set for Dec. 1 at 12:00 UTC. The backbone of Ethereum 2.0, the Beacon chain is an interim blockchain that will operate alongside the current network as it begins the first of four migration phases to the new network. Yesterday, the deposit contract for the Beacon chain received the minimum ETH necessary to lock in Eth 2.0’s “genesis day” of Dec. 1. All of Ethereum 2.0’s primary implementations have agreed upon […]
The smart contract that will trigger the first phase of Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade yet has nearly accrued enough funds to activate. The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract currently holds 385,440 ($231 million) of the requisite 524,288 ETH required to activate Ethereum 2.0’s beacon chain, the central nervous system of the completely rebooted network. This represents roughly 75% of the threshold needed to activate the upgrade. The Ethereum Foundation set a soft launch date for the new Ethereum network of Dec. 1, so if the deposit contract reaches 100% of the necessary deposits by, for instance, Nov. 24, then the Beacon chain […]
Gnosis, one of Ethereum’s earliest ICOs, is spinning up a DAO that uses a novel mode of governance you’ve probably never heard of. The newly launched GnosisDAO will allow Gnosis users to vote on platform governance and development. Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelmann told CoinDesk the DAO’s voting proposals “can be really wide-reaching: product roadmap decisions, treasury management, starting new ventures, funding public goods. DAOs open up a large space for collaboration and experimentation.” One of GnosisDAO’s key marketing points is its integration with the Gnosis prediction markets. Because any protocol change will have an associated prediction market where traders are betting […]
Lightning Labs’ new liquidity marketplace, Lightning Pool, has seen more early-stage growth than its creators expected. And what’s more, a fair share of its volume is coming from individual Lightning users – not businesses. “It’s a big surprise! Very exciting,” Lightning Labs Business Development head Ryan Gentry told CoinDesk. “The primary users thus far have been a mix of power users and startups/businesses who are already running Lightning nodes.” Since launch, Lightning Pool has facilitated over 11.5 BTC in orders (worth just over $208,000). According to data from a community-built Lightning Pool tweet bot, the service has several dozen active users […]
After the most recent Mac update caused major problems for one of Bitcoin’s oldest wallets, its development team has rolled out a fix. Originally raised as an issue on Github, the Big Sur update is bricking MacOS Electrum clients, a Bitcoin software wallet which is a favorite of power users because of its complex tooling and user controls. The Electrum team announced today that a new release fixes the issue. “Currently, the latest release of Big Sur has completely broken Electrum [for Mac devices]. You can’t open the app or load any of your wallets,” one Electrum user, Nico, told CoinDesk. […]
Apple’s most recent update, Big Sur, makes a feature that logs device activity for offline (and online) applications practically impossible for privacy solutions to bypass. The monitoring is yet another example of Apple’s privacy-compromising design choices, despite the company’s efforts to present itself as a privacy ally. VPNs and other firewalls cannot circumvent the feature. Security researchers suggest that users who care about their digital privacy explore other, open-source alternatives. On Nov. 12, Mac users complained their computers were acting sluggish. This sluggishness coincided with the release of Big Sur, the latest Mac update fro Apple. After the update was released, […]
The bulk of Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem went dark earlier today after a latent bug in the Ethereum code split the network’s transaction history in two. The split resulted from a code change that was surreptitiously inserted into a previous Geth update and activated today; some Ethereum node operators ignored the update, which ironically was meant to prevent the very split that occurred. The nodes that did not upgrade were under the impression the update was minor and did not know it included a change to Ethereum’s consensus design. A post-mortem released today by Geth indicates that a hard fork to push […]
In traditional business, “key person risk” refers to when a company relies too much on one individual to succeed. Cryptocurrency businesses are prone to a very literal version of this risk when handling funds. The most infamous example may be QuadrigaCX, whose customers have been waiting nearly 3 years to recoup $115 million worth of deposits since the death of founder Gerald Cotten, the sole possessor of the cryptographic keys to the exchange’s wallet. Fortunately, multisignature cryptocurrency wallets offer a built-in way to manage this sort of risk. Multisignature wallets (or multisig, for short), are cryptocurrency wallets which require two or […]
After going live last week, the deposit contract for Ethereum’s 2.0 upgrade now holds over 50k ETH – 10% of the threshold needed to activate the watershed update. This deposit contract is the cornerstone of the Ethereum 2.0 update and serves as a bridge for the migration Ethereum network away from proof-of-work (PoW) to a new technical infrastructure that supports proof-of-stake (PoS). In order to become a transaction validator on the new network (those individuals who process transactions like miners in PoW), an Ethereum user must stake at least 32 ETH. There are currently 52,801 ETH locked up in the deposit […]
When Bitcoin SV (BSV) forked from Bitcoin Cash, its mandate to create a faster, payments-focused blockchain required gutting some of Bitcoin’s key technical features. In doing so, it gutted some of Bitcoin’s key features; now, it’s worse off for it. One of these features, the so-called pay-to-script hash (P2SH) function, allows a user to send a transaction by signing it to a “script” rather than a public key address. These scripts create special conditions that must be met in order to access the bitcoins sent to them, and they are most often used in multi-signature transactions – or, transactions that require […]
Some $1 million in Ethereum tokens is locked in a new DeFi app after its developers made changes to the protocol’s interest rate smart contracts. DeFi lending platform PercentFinance, a fork of Compound Finance, wrote in a blog post on Nov. 4 that “that some of [its] money markets experienced an issue that can result in permanent locking of user funds.” The team froze money markets specifically for USDC, ETH and wrapped bitcoin (WBTC). A total of 446K USDC, 28 WBTC and 313 ETH , worth approximately $1 million, are currently frozen. Half of these immobile funds belong to PercentFinance’s “community […]
With Bitcoin’s long-awaited Taproot upgrade on the horizon, the engineers at Blockstream are working on a new scheme to improve multi-signature transactions. These transactions, which require signatures from more than one private key to authorize spends, will stand to benefit from Taproot. This upgrade implements Schnorr signatures into Bitcoin’s codebase, a cryptographic signature scheme that will make creating and executing smart contracts easier on the network. In a post-election day blog post, Blockstream engineers Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing lay out a new multi-signature design that would reduce the technical complexity of multi-signature transactions in a way that still preserves privacy. […]
The code for Taproot, Bitcoin’s biggest upgrade in years, is finalized and has been packaged into a forthcoming update. Only, it’s not ready to be deployed yet because Bitcoin developers have differing opinions on the best route to activation. Taproot will enhance Bitcoin’s smart contract capabilities by implementing a new digital signature scheme, Schnorr. Implementing the upgrade requires a “soft fork” of Bitcoin’s code, and there are a few competing proposals for how to activate it. In a bid to expedite implementation discussions, Bitcoin Core contributor A.J. Towns recently surveyed 12 other developers who have been active in the implementation process […]
The MakerDAO community is voting on a proposal to harden the protocol’s governance structure against flash loan voting. Source link
The Lightning Network is a young protocol, and it’s going through some technical growing pains as its tech stack grows and its network expands. While most of the vulnerabilities (covered in part one of this series) are neither protocol-breaking nor easy to exploit, they’re still reminders that improvements come with trade-offs – and that security and usability are two sides of the same coin. This is the second article in our two-part series on existing vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Part one detailed the outstanding vulnerabilities and their risk factors. Part two will examine why these weak spots have never been […]
Bitcoin mining profitability is in the basement, seeing all-time lows in 2020. Conversely, Bitcoin’s hashrate has surged throughout 2020, propelled in part by mining farms financing new hardware to boost their operations. Bitcoin’s hashrate has taken a dip as China’s wet season comes to an end, but mining professionals predict this will only be temporary, and it has only improved profit margins so much. Bitcoin mining profits have been rock bottom in 2020. For much of the year, the cryptocurrency has been less profitable to mine than ever. And that’s because Bitcoin’s collective hashrate – or how much computing power is […]
This is the first article in our two-part series on existing vulnerabilities in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Part one details the outstanding vulnerabilities and their risk factors. Part two will examine why these weak spots have never been exploited, what changes may be made to fix them and the developing trade-offs that come from balancing user-friendly applications and air-tight security. A running joke (or perhaps, an admission) in Bitcoin circles asserts that Bitcoin’s most steadfast proponents are also its most trenchant critics, particularly those in its developer circle. They know how the sausage is made, so to speak, and can see the […]
Tucked away on a quiet street in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, Room 77 had the look of your typical dive bar – until you paid attention to the details. If you did, you’d notice the grungy scene was punctuated with cypherpunk paraphernalia. One brick wall overlooking a row of booths was populated by the portraits of Ross Ulrbicht, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Adjacent to these crypto-anarchy icons, a currency burner (which does exactly what you think it does) sat where an arcade game might have in any other bar. Above the register, at a bar with five or so seats, was […]
A first-of-its kind service wants to play matchmaker between big-scale mining facilities and individual miners looking for a hosting setup. Bitcoin mining company HASHR8 just launched its Compass platform, a search engine of sorts for individual miners to shop for a hosting facility to operate their mining hardware for them. While mining farms hosting solo miners’ machines is nothing new, Compass is the first service to create a product to sync miners with hosting providers. The initiative was born from a drive to keep Bitcoin’s hashrate distributed, and that starts with making sure the smaller-time miners can stay competitive. “We believe […]
It all started with a couple of retweets. On September 28, Andrew Cronje, the head honcho at Yearn Finance, retweeted graphic designs for a new project called Eminence, so described by Cronje as a DeFi protocol for a “gaming multiverse.” The game is allegedly a spin-off of a 2016 kickstarter trading card game called Eminence: Xander’s Tales and may incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The retweets included graphic designs of the words “Spartan” and “Marine” (playful nods to the respective monikers given to the Synthetix and Chainlink fanbases) and was an “art teaser” meant to “showcase all the different clans in the […]
The MakerDAO community has voted to add support for a trio of new tokens for the decentralized finance (DeFi) loans that generate DAI stablecoins. Vaults are now open for deposits of Chainlink’s LINK, Loopring’s LRC and Compound’s COMP. Community members pitched proposals to add the tokens this summer and voted for their integration via Maker’s on-chain governance platform this week. Counting this new crop of collateral options, MakerDAO has added 11 new DAI vault pairs this year. The other tokens, MANA, WBTC, ZRX, KNC, TUSD, PAX, USDC and USDT, were added partly in response to DAI losing its $1 peg, as […]
The first time he was SIM-swapped in 2018, Haseeb Awan took it on the chin and hoped it wouldn’t happen again. Then came the second incident. Then the third. Then the fourth. After the last swap, Awan stopped trusting his mobile provider to keep his account safe and took matters into his own hands: He started his own cell service company. It was a major pivot from his former day job running the BitAccess Bitcoin ATM network, a company he co-founded and which, incidentally, made him a prime target for SIM-swapping. His new venture, Efani, is dedicated to stopping a problem […]
For this year’s Blockchain Commons internship, Christopher Allen had an uncommon “problem”: too many quality applications to turn down. Instead, he expanded the program to accommodate 7 interns where he usually only accepts one. With the internship drawing to a close, the interns have just about completed their projects – but that doesn’t mean they’re done contributing to Bitcoin’s open source projects. When Christopher Allen received applications for the 2020 Blockchain Commons internship, he had a problem: He had more applications than he had ever received in the internship’s history, and all from stellar applicants. This was a good problem to […]
While so-called “DeFi degens” are busy bidding up the price of food-themed tokens, on the other end of crypto’s DeFi spectrum two teams working on the most popular implementations of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network have been busy pushing out new features. This week, both Lightning Labs, which maintains the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) implementation of the Lightning Network, and Blockstream, which maintains the c-lightning implementation, updated their tech stacks. Read more: What Is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network? For Lightning Labs, the update comes to its Faraday suite with the addition of an automated accounting feature to make bookkeeping easier for node operators and Lightning […]
“Republican_win”; “Democratic_win.” These are the parameters (and call functions) for the first smart contract escrowed bet placed on Bitcoin’s mainnet. On Sept. 8, BTCPay Server founder Nicolas Dorier and Suredbits founder Chris Stewart entered the bet on the 2020 U.S. presidential election outcome using a discrete log contract (DSL), a form of smart contract that became feasible on Bitcoin just this year, thanks to independent Bitcoin developer Lloyd Fournier’s technical advancements in the realm of so-called “scriptless-scripts” on Bitcoin’s blockchain. As for who took which side of the bet, Dorier and Stewart didn’t say. Even after Election Day when the votes […]
Under development by the LNP/BP Standards Association, the RGB protocol entered beta in June. The second layer network promises to bring smart contracts and tokenized assets to Bitcoin with a Lightning Network-esque technical design. RGB could be used to issue tokenize securities and nonfungible tokens (NFT), and to offer a more private means of stablecoin issuance and transfer. Smart contracts and Bitcoin. These technical phenomena are rarely associated with each other, often because people believe Bitcoin’s paired-down scripting language can’t support the smart contract applications that have become the darlings of the Ethereum ecosystem. But as the new smart contract-enabling protocol […]
The SushiSwap community has voted on policy changes to the protocol to reduce the token reward schedule, introduce a lock-up period for newly minted Sushi, and introduce fee staking. But these changes can’t be made without first migrating to new smart contracts, a research firm told CoinDesk. The current MasterChef contract doesn’t permit changes to the SushiToken contract, which in turn dictates other protocol functions for minting SUSHI tokens and for paying fee-staking rewards to SushiSwap holders. Each smart contract would have to be manually migrated to make the changes, the research firm claims, though the SushiSwap team is looking for […]
As traders gobble up stablecoins for yield farming, demand for MakerDAO’s dai (DAI) has sent the stablecoin’s peg skyward. The yield farming demand continues to put pressure on dai’s $1 peg, which has been under consistent stress since Black Thursday when market volatility sent dai’s price to $1.10. MakerDAO’s community is debating some tweaks to its monetary policy to restore the peg, though Maker’s creator believes the only long-term solution is adding additional, varied collateral to the DAO. Booming demand for stablecoins in DeFi’s yield farming landscape is breaking the peg for Ethereum’s only crypto-collateralized stablecoin. The Maker community is searching […]
Wasabi Wallet users need to upgrade to the latest version if they want to continue using the CoinJoin feature to keep their Bitcoin transaction histories private. That’s because those running older iterations of the wallet can no longer use this feature to mix their coins with users who have the newest version. The Wasabi Wallet team hard-forked the wallet Thursday to address a vulnerability discovered by a team member at Trezor, a leading maker of hardware wallets. A hard fork is a code change that makes older versions of a software incompatible with newer ones. The flaw’s discovery is another example […]
A hypothetical man-in-the-middle attack would have allowed an attacker to hold users’ crypto for ransom on Trezor and KeepKey hardware wallets. Source link
New research from RSK/IOV’s Sergio Demian Lerner reveals that Patoshi, an early Bitcoin miner assumed by many to be Satoshi Nakamoto, mined using an algorithm that was not included in Bitcoin’s first client release. This finding finally explicates why Patoshi’s hashing patterns are so much different than other, early Bitcoin miners, but raises the question: Why did Patoshi give themselves a leg up? If we take for granted that Patoshi is, in fact, Satoshi, then it’s conceivable that Bitcoin’s creator used this advantage to prevent mining attacks on the nascent network. When he first presented his research on Satoshi’s alleged treasure […]
Privacy-focused Bitcoin software wallet Wasabi is getting a major protocol overhaul. The Wasabi team is working on a new protocol design, dubbed WabiSabi, in a bid to improve the user experience and privacy guarantees of the wallet’s CoinJoin transactions. The major design change would allow users to coinjoin with different values than their peers, a first for the privacy-minded technology that could lead to new (and more flexible) use cases. Wasabi has been conceptualizing the design in a research group since the beginning of 2020 and has hired team members to work on the implementation. Out with the old Currently, Wasabi’s […]
A cybersecurity firm has unearthed a monero mining script embedded in a public instance of an Amazon Web Service (AWS) virtual machine. Now the firm is raising the question: How many other community Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) are infected with the same malware? Researchers at Mitiga revealed in a blog post Friday an AWS AMI for a Windows 2008 virtual server hosted by an unverified vendor is infected with a Monero mining script. The malware would have infected any device running the AMI with the purpose of using the device’s processing power to mine the privacy coin monero in the background […]
When dust settles in your home, you wipe it up. But what about when unwanted dust makes its way into your bitcoin wallet? Well, cleaning it up may not be so simple. In Bitcoin parlance, “dust” is the technical term given to trace amounts of bitcoin that are considered too small to send in a transaction because the transaction fee would exceed the amount sent. Typically, dust is no more than a few hundred satoshis (a microunit of measurement for bitcoin). Because sending dust is expensive relative to the transaction size, normal bitcoin users have no reason to transact with dust. […]