"Most transactions have an event log, but those event logs can be hard to read."
advanced
"A sparse Merkle tree is like a standard Merkle tree, except the contained data is indexed, and each data block is placed at the leaf that corresponds to that block’s index."
"In this work we present CacheOut, a new microarchitectural attack that is capable of bypassing Intel’s buffer overwrite countermeasures."
"Thanks to Ariel Gabizon and Zac Williamson for collaborating on the post, and the authors of Marlin 9 for highlighting the attack and its importance."
"Our proof-of-concept improves Swarm's resilience to failures by balancing repairs and storage, with a slightly added latency."
"In this post we describe the use of reinforcement learning (RL) agents as a tool of signal detection of fairness, the idea that dishonest parties have no advantage over honest ones in distributed protocols."
"Most of the discussion will be at a relatively high and intuitive level; it is assumed only that the reader has a basic familiarity with zero-knowledge proof systems, group theory, and computational complexity up to understanding the class of problems known as NP."
"In a zero-knowledge proof, a prover wants to convince a verifier that some public statement is true. However, the proof of this statement holds sensitive details that can’t be shared."
"A key requirement of any blockchain is its ability to secure its chain. A secure chain is one in which transactions are verifiable and immutable i.e. by referring to the blockchain someone can obtain the details of a transaction that took place, and be sure the details are not faked and the transaction cannot be altered retrospectively."
"For the past century economists have proposed a suite of theories relating to industrial dynamics, technological change and innovation. There has been an implication in these models that the institutional environment is stable. However, a new class of institutional technologies—most notably blockchain technology—lower the cost of institutional entrepreneurship along these margins, propelling a process of institutional evolution."
"The paper shows that platform tokenization can alleviate underprovision of non-contractible entrepreneurial effort."
"Corporations and other forms of business organizations can be supplemented with blockchain-based agency constructs. Blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) expand the definition of the firm. On-chain DAO governance enables dynamic regulatory features that facilitate unprecedented decentralized regulatory solutions."
"As common encryption techniques reach their limits when applied to complex decentralized identity schemes, proxy re-encryption may emerge as a suitable solution."
"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."