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"Google’s ‘Sycamore’ quantum computer was able to achieve “quantum supremacy” — solving a complex problem that would otherwise be impossible for a classical computer to solve in its lifetime — in just three minutes and 20 seconds, compared to the estimated 10,000 years it would take the world’s most advanced classical computer, Summit."
"Existing broadcast protocols for this setting scale poorly, as they typically build on quorum systems with strong intersection guarantees, which results in linear per-process communication and computation complexity."
"We present two types of active side-channel attacks against private (a.k.a. shielded) transactions in Zcash. The attacks, called PING and REJECT, exploit differences in behavior between the payee of a particular shielded transaction and the remaining Zcash clients. By monitoring peer-to-peer traffic and injecting its own messages, an active attacker can remotely observe these differences due to fault and timing side-channels."
"How might blockchain-based financial markets be regulated and supervised? This paper argues that asset tokenisation and underlying distributed ledger technology (DLT) open up new ways of supervising financial risks. It then puts the case for "embedded supervision", ie a framework that allows compliance with regulatory goals to be automatically monitored by reading the market's ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data."
"With the birth and rise of cryptocurrencies following the success of Bitcoin and the popularity of 'Initial Coin Offerings,' public awareness of blockchain technologies has substantially increased in recent years. Many blockchain advocates claim that these software artefacts enable radically new forms of decentralised governance by relying upon computational trust created via cryptographic proof, obviating the need for reliance on conventional trusted third-party intermediaries."
"Halo achieves practical zero-knowledge recursive proof composition without the need for a trusted setup."
"This paper presents a sketch of a new building block for decentralized finance: yTokens. yTokens are like zero-coupon bonds: on-chain obligations that settle on a specific future date based on the price of some target asset, and are secured by collateral in another asset."
"But because Bech32 is designed from some cool (but potentially confusing) mathematics rather than just chucking a hash on the end, this article will hopefully make some of the underlying technical details a bit more transparent for all those interested."
"One of the weaknesses of all voting, including quadratic voting, is that for any large-scale issue each individual’s ability to affect the result is so small, and so the incentive to deeply reflect and understand one’s genuine beliefs about an issue is tiny."
"A Decentralized Redeemable BTC-backed ERC-20 Token"
"Wavelet introduces a novel family of directed-acyclic-graph (DAG)-based consensus protocols. It is designed to alleviate the numerous scalability dilemmas predicated in decentralized ledgers, such as those that utilize either the longest chain rule, or some variant of stake delegation or committee election scheme."
"René Girard was a literary theorist, philosopher, and sociologist, who wrote about the nature of desire—among many other topics. His model of borrowed desire applies exceptionally well to financial bubbles. This paper explores the theory, with examples from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries."
"Within a matter of hours, Coinbase Security detected and blocked the attack. Here’s how it unfolded."
"Do Libra’s Intentions Line Up With What Its Source Code Tells Us?"
"In order to do that, the machines need to agree on a global clock. The “clock problem” is the challenge in getting many distrusting machines to agree on a global clock in Byzantine settings. Once everyone agrees on a global clock, transaction ordering becomes a much simpler problem because each transaction is timestamped using the same global clock."
"Today, we’ll look at the DPA layer of Swarm, which is responsible for parcellating files into chunks and putting them back together, along with encrypting & decrypting them. In this blog, I will try to depict these four functionalities and the inner workings of the DPA. The image below shows where the DPA fits in the Swarm architecture."
"Given this fundamental similarity, why go with one approach over the others?"
"Although often described as debt instruments, they are far more complex than a traditional bond and involve elements of options trading. Reverse convertibles expose investors not only to risks traditionally associated with bonds and other fixed income products—such as the risk of issuer default and inflation risk—but also to the additional risks of the unrelated assets, which are often stocks."
