Reading Time: 4 minutes
Blockchains are already used to store non-financial data for diverse purposes, e.g. to prove authorship of ideas or to prove the existence of a document. One of the largest files stored successfully into the Bitcoin blockchain is an image of Nelson Mandela.
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Micropayment take place in pay-as-you-go software service models, micro donations, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these contexts payments for values which are usually under the smallest unit of fiat money (e.g. $0.001) are needed. Prepaid cards can solve this problem. Another approach uses cryptocurrencies in the blockchain, having the advantage of allowing exact […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes
In this blog post, we present a high-level overview of the paper describing the Ouroboros Proof of Stake protocol implemented in Cardano´s blockchain. After the overview follow some comments about theoretical aspects of the protocol.
In general, Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus protocols elect the network nodes responsible to send the next block to the blockchain on the basis of the nodes’ amount of stake.
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Prior to the Bitcoin blockchain of “Satoshi Nakamoto”, distributed ledger systems were lacking two important properties which are essential for a decentralized digital cash system. The first property which existing distributed ledger systems were missing, was the ability to scale to a network of millions of users. And secondly, systems at the time were not permissionless
Reading Time: 10 minutes
Introduction Public blockchains are not suited to function as a data storage provider. Since they are append-only ledgers, storing many large files would result in a dramatic increase of the whole distributed ledger. That would force the network nodes to store huge databases leaving it in the hands of just a few providers. Likewise, the […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Cryptocurrency Exchanges Anyone who wants to get into the cryptocurrency market and does not want to mine blocks needs to exchange his fiat money at an exchange, the only alternative to this is to get cryptocurrency from another holder. Centralized exchanges like Bitfinex, Coinbase, Kraken, Poloniex or Shapeshift intermediate the bid and offer matching process […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes
We are compiling a list of recent technologies developments in the blockchain sector. Our focus is mostly on projects which promise scalability, but includes also proposals which aim to overcome some deficiencies in Bitcoin´s PoW based blockchain, e.g. which aim to improve fairness, usefulness, or privacy. You can find the current state of our work […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes
It is important to have an estimate of risk for a portfolio when trading with financial assets. Two basic and commonly used risk measures are value-at-risk and expected shortfall. We will illustrate the two concepts with an example and provide the necessary R code to actually calculate the values of both measures. If we take […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Transactions in Bitcoin are recorded in its blockchain. This makes it possible to see whether coins sent through the network are still valid unspent coins. At the same time, however, the transparency of the data stored in the blockchain can be used to infer private information of users. There are already many cryptocurrencies and “money […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes
AppeCoin, Sergio D. Lerner‘s proposal for an e-cash scheme, is designed for a peer-to-peer network which does not rely on a Trusted Third Party. Like the cryptocurrencies Monero or Zcash, AppeCoin is a protocol which aims to guarantee to its users full privacy. Lerner’s e-cash scheme leverages coin shuffling. Unlike ZeroCoin, where the monetary units […]
Reading Time: 1
The full technical article is available here. Introduction Payment confidentiality is a property for cryptocurrencies which allows the user to hide the sender and receiver, as well as the amount of a transaction in the blockchain. Monero Research Lab invented Ring Confidential Transactions, while Zcash uses a different approach based on recent scientific progress in the field […]
Reading Time: 1
Synopsis of our full article: Though the research on quantum computers is still facing big challenges, there is also some progress in this field. The National Institute of Security and Technology (NIST) recently published a report on Post-Quantum Cryptography which informs about new developments. They believe that it is time to think of quantum-safe primitives, […]