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Making sense of colored coins

Making sense of colored coins

It’s impossible to walk around the distributed ledger landscape without encountering the idea of so-called “colored coins”. The purpose of this post is to clarify their nature, the motivation behind...

Arthur B. Arthur B.
17 Aug 2015
A functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers

A functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers

In the interest of bringing some much-needed sanity to the discussion surrounding “blockchain technology” I have attempted to establish a functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers.

Arthur B. Arthur B.
10 Aug 2015
What do blockchains accomplish

What do blockchains accomplish

What do blockchains accomplish?

Arthur B. Arthur B.
02 Aug 2015

“”Decentralized”, you keep using that word but I don’t think it means what you think it means…”

"Decentralized" doesn't mean what most people think. Popularly it suggests diluted power; in systems theory it means participants act on local information, with no participant given an explicit role.

L.M. Goodman L.M. Goodman
21 Jul 2014

Disincentive to pool mining with Fawke signatures

An improved, SHA-256-only scheme to discourage mining pools from forming — Fawke signatures, refining the earlier Lamport approach — for when that goal is worth pursuing at all.

L.M. Goodman L.M. Goodman
20 Jun 2014

Why Mining Variance Matters

Miners join pools mainly to reduce the variance of their returns. But if the expectation is unchanged, why does variance matter so much? A look at the risk math of...

L.M. Goodman L.M. Goodman
19 Jun 2014