#Bünz

[als-aargauer-unterwegs]

Reusstal hinauf, Bünztal hinunter Vollständiger Bericht bei: https://agu.li/28i Die Bise kühlte noch mehr ab, dafür war der Himmel fast wolkenlos. Das GPS registrierte 58.4 KM und 451 Höhenmeter.

[swissforextrading]

Why isn't the salmon making a comeback in Switzerland?

The return of salmon in Switzerland has so far been a flop. Experts are dismayed and are looking for answers. First the good news: young salmon, thousands of which are released in Switzerland every year, manage to swim towards the sea. This is not something to take for granted, as they swim in the middle of the river and must deal with turbines at power stations on the river. They run the danger of being chopped up or crushed. Take the small river Bünz in canton Aargau, for example. The fish have to pass through three turbines on the way to the Rhine. "Around 81% made it, which was a positive surprise for us," says fish ecologist Armin Peter. He tagged the fish for a study. There are a further 14 turbines to the lowest power station in the Rhine. "There are actually young salmon that survive this journey," says Peter, who is investigating this in another ongoing study. Number of returnees decreases drastically There has also been good news for a long time about the return... https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/why-isn-t-the-salmon-making-a-comeback-in-switzerland-/49160782?utm_campaign=swi-rss&utm_source=multiple&utm_medium=rss&utm_content=o (Source of the original content)

[btc-current-blog]

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

[ad_1]

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

[ad_2] View Reddit by SamsungGalaxyPlayer – View Source

[weekinethereum]

December 14, 2018 Week in Ethereum News

News and Links

Layer 1

[Eth 2] Danny Ryan’s state of the spec

[Eth 2] Latest Eth 2 implementers call. Agenda to follow along.

[Eth 2] What’s New in Eth2

[Eth 2] Latest Prysmatic dev update

[Eth 2] Lighthouse dev update

[Eth 2] Coindesk profiles the teams building Eth2

[ewasm] Latest Ewasm call.

[1 -> 2] When stable, the beacon chain to finalize the POW chain

[Eth1] State Rent proposal update

[Eth1] How types of contracts would handle contract state-root-plus-witness architecture

NEAR: Unsolved problems in blockchain sharding

Boneh, Bünz, Fisch: Batching Techniques for Accumulators for stateless chains

Justin Drake Ethereum 3.0 tweet

Layer 2

Storj is planning to use Raiden for its payments. Raiden v0.19

Building MixEth as a state channel dapp with Counterfactual

Celer’s team to play their state channel Gomoku game for real Eth

gas payment abstraction in layer 2

prime numbers to transactions instead of coins?

should fraudulent exit bonds be partially burned?

Demo snark for Plasma Cash and Cashflow history compaction

SKALE releases architecture of their sidechain network

Stuff for developers

Ethereum on ARM. Constantinople-ready images

registry-builder: A modular approach to building TCRs from LevelK

7 uses cases with 3box.js

Gnosis Apollo to create your own prediction market interface or tournament

Schedule your token transfers on MyCrypto using Ethereum Alarm Clock

BudgetBox from Colony. Binary choices turned into budget percentages, and can be done onchain. Github

web3j v4.1 for Android

You can now integrate Gitcoin’s Kudos into your app. Gitcoin also hit 500k in issues.

A quick Austin Griffith tutorial on Commit/Reveal

Matt Tyndall’s counterfactual loan repayment for Dharma

Linkdrops: let people send crypto embedded in URLs without gas/wallets

Panoramix decompiler using symbolic execution instead of static analysis

Streamr’s cold chain monitoring tutorial

Dennis Peterson: Spam protection with probabilistic payments and cheap doublespending protection

How to debug with Tenderly and Truffle

A teaser for Harvey fuzzer from ConsenSys Diligence

Automated Eth code exploiter and similar how to scan and steal ETH

Hard fork enabled client releases

Geth v1.8.20 - hard fork enabled, Puppeth improvements, etc

Parity Ethereum 2.2.5-beta and Parity Ethereum 2.1.10-stable hardfork enabled

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.20 Constantinople support and genesis file support 

Ecosystem

Opera releases native Eth wallet and dapp browser for Android. Download. Slick and well worth checking out.

How I learned Solidity basics for free as a noob dev

Uncle rate keeps falling. Time to start nudging up the gaslimit?

Monetary policy chart of historic and future Ether issuance

All the impressive ETHSingapore submissions and winners. Some of Josh Stark’s favorites.

A comparison of ETHSanFrancisco and EOS SF hackathons

Ethereum product management interviews. Also, video of Eth PMs call

Alethio’s EthStats block explorer

Ecosystem job listings

Web3Foundation, Validity Labs and Status working on Whisper alternative

Live on mainnet

OriginTrail: data exchange in supply chains protocol

Enterprise

Quorum v2.2.0

Cheddar suggests Facebook wants to do its own basechain and is recruiting

Why Enterprise Ethereum is way more than DLT

See OriginTrail above

Governance and Standards

ProgPOW testnet block explorer

A quick case study on Aragon’s AGP1 proposal

Evolution of a security token standard

ERC1643: Document Management Standard

ERC1644: Controller Token Operation Standard

ERC1666: Decentralized Autonomous Zero-identity Protocol

ERC1613: Gas stations network

Application layer

Cellarius first anthology released. Free to MetaMask users.

Golem’s Graphene-ng demo part2

XYO Network to launch satellite named EtherX on SpaceX’s Falcon9 in next few months

Data auditing and repair with Storj

The Fluidity stack to allow liquid secondary markets

Vitalik tweetstorm on non-financial apps

Onchain mutual insurance to return insurance to its origin: communities sharing risk

p2p loan offers on Bloqboard using Dharma

Ujo Portal out of beta and in version1.

KyberNetwork’s monthly update - new reserves, wBTC updated

Liquality offers crosschain swap of testnet Eth for Bitcoin. You can also get a good price buying Eth with Summa’s crosschain swap

GnosisSafe users can pay gas fees in OWL.

Maker proposal to reduce stability fee from 2.5% to 0.5%. Vote Dec 17

Augur’s controversial US House elections market has been reported as Republican. This is obviously nonsense because no one would have bet on that market and it makes no sense to encourage wordsmith trickery. This is a huge test of Augur and will be interesting to watch. Also, v1.8.4 out with new node endpoint. And a nice Augur 2018 review from Guesser

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks

All Devcon4 videos and photos

Arthur Falls uploads some Joe Lubin Devcon3 video footage

Video: a Wolfram language platform for Ethereum

Zero Knowledge ETHSingapore episode

Open Block Explorers community call

Blockchain Insider with Vitalik Buterin

Grid+ Alex Miller and Karl Kreder on Hashing It Out

Prysmatic’s Preston Van Loon and Raul Jordan on Into the Ether

Andrew Keys talks ConsenSys2.0 with Laura Shin

Tokens / Business / Regulation

Chris Burniske argues Ether and Bitcoin prices are undervalued based on fundamentals

4 eras of blockchain computing: degrees of composability from Jesse Walden

CFTC requests input. EthHub and Brooklyn Project are both crowd sourcing responses

Basecoin/Basis quits after raising ~130m and returns money to its VCs, blaming the SEC. I feel there may be more to come with this story.

MythX (formerly Mythril) decides against its announced token

Don’t think there was any doubt, but Coinbase is listing tokens. 30 assets up for consideration

Bonding curve intuition and parameterization

Harberger taxes in action on r/ethtrader banners

Simon de la Rouviere: Desire paths and recommendation markets

General

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Starter Pack

Support starving Venezuelans by buying NFT Christmas cards through Giveth. Easy onboarding for your non-crypto friends.

Results of Bounties Network paying local to participate in Manila Bay beach cleanup. Some interesting UX lessons.

Terra-Bridge: Transfer between Ethereum and Bitcoin protocol

CMEGroup puts up an Intro to Ether course

Zilliqa testnet v3 is live and in feature freeze ahead of January mainnet release. It also got an AWS case study

Boerse Stuttgart and SolarisBank say in next 6 months they’ll launch crypto trading platform in Europe

The state of Surveillance Capitalism is dire: your apps are tracking your location and selling it. It’s very easy to figure out who you are from your location. Bring on web3!

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new in bold):

Dec 17 - vote to reduce Maker stability fee

Jan 10 - Mobi Grand Challenge hackathon ends

Jan ~15 - Constantinople hard fork at block 7080000

Jan 29-30 - AraCon (Berlin)

Feb 7-8 - Melonport’s M1 conf (Zug)

Feb 15-17 - ETHDenver hackathon (ETHGlobal) next hacker application round closes December 31st

Feb 23-25 - EthAustin hackathon (EthUniversal)

Mar 4 - Ethereum Magicians (Paris)

Mar 5-7 - EthCC (Paris)

Mar 27 - Infura end of legacy key support (Jan 23 begins Project ID prioritization)

Apr 19-21 - ETHCapetown

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This newsletter is made possible by ConsenSys.

I own Week In Ethereum. Editorial control has always been 100% me.  If you're unhappy with editorial decisions or anything that I have written in this issue, feel free to tweet at me. 

Housekeeping and random Twitter banhammers

One of my best friends launched Stoop, an Android/iOS newsletter reader. It uses a dedicated email and clean design experience to keep your information diet healthy. If you subscribe to newsletters, you will like it.

Link: http://www.weekinethereum.com/post/181120057303/december-14-2018-week-in-ethereum-news

I’m sure that I missed things for this newsletter due to Twitter’s banhammer last week. Sorry! Plenty of folks in Ethereum got random Twitter banhammers this week.  :(

If you’re wondering “why didn’t my post make it into Week in Ethereum?”

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[claracai]

a16z Kicks Off Crypto Research Lab Led by Columbia, Stanford Professors

Key Insights: Andreessen Horowitz is building a dedicated crypto research lab.

Professors from Columbia and Stanford will lead the team to address the hardest problems in web3.

The lab will work closely with its portfolio companies to solve important issues in the crypto space.

Andreessen Horowitz, after accelerating its push into the metaverse, now wants to solve “some of the hardest problems in web3.”

a16z Forms Crypto Research Unit Venture capital giant a16z on Thursday announced that it is deep-diving into the crypto space with the launch of a new crypto research unit.

Dubbed a16z Crypto Research, the unit will bring researchers from top US universities to tackle issues and risks in web3 and the crypto space. The team will be spearheaded by Tim Roughgarden, a professor at Columbia and Stanford who has written extensively on Web3.

The VC noted that the research lab is modeled after AI-powered OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind.

“we’re excited to announce the creation of a16z crypto research, a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that will work closely with our portfolio and others toward solving the important problems in the space and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.”

Why Web3? Andreessen Horowitz has just begun exploring the web3, or what it calls an “extremely rich design space for innovation.”

New entrepreneurial applications in the web3 space have uncovered fresh research challenges and questions such as how the computational infrastructure will scale and evolve and how token incentives in protocols should be structured.

The crypto-dedicated academic unit aims to address such problems by, for instance, developing new tools that would help its portfolio companies grow their businesses.

Joining the founding board are Harvard’s Scott Duke Kominers, Meta’s Valeria Nikolaenko, author Joseph Bonneau and researcher Benedikt Bünz.

Visit textbook printing homepage for more details.

Investment firm Paradigm has built a similar strategy. For instance, Rick and Morty animated series creator, worked with Paradigm on a new NFT sales mechanism.

According to Ali Yahya, the general partner at a16z,

“So many people in this space claim to have research, and I think a big difference here is that this is ‘capital R’ research, and it connects basically world-class talent at the scientific academic level, with world-class talent at the engineering level, with the best and most interesting problems in the space through the portfolio.

[kraluku]

Wohlen AG, Switzerland - small River "Bünz"

[truthblockchain]

Stanford Engineers Build A Blockchain Focused On Privacy

Now, a team of researchers from Stanford University’s applied cryptography research group has entered the fray. The team is coming out of stealth mode with Espresso, a new layer-one blockchain they are building to allow for higher throughput and lower gas fees while prioritizing user privacy and decentralization. Espresso aims to optimize for both privacy and scalability by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic tool that allows a party to prove a statement is true without revealing the evidence behind that statement, CEO Ben Fisch told TechCrunch in an interview.

Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu and chief scientist Benedikt Bünz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen’s Chia. They’ve teamed up with chief strategy officer Jill Gunter, a former crypto investor at Slow Ventures who is the fourth Espresso Systems co-founder, to take their blockchain and associated products to market.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/07/stanford-crypto-researchers-building-espresso-privacy-scalability-blockchain/amp/

[bodhisatta]

UwU

[thecryptoreport]

Co-founders of Findora reveal sub-10KB zero-knowledge proof system

Co-founders of Findora reveal sub-10KB zero-knowledge proof system

The co-founders of Findora, a confidential network protocol that enables seamless and secure transfer of financial assets, Stanford cryptographers Ben Fisch and Benedikt Bünz, together with Alan Szepeniec, today have revealed their latest breakthrough in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), ‘Supersonic’.

Supersonic proofs will be integrated into the Findora platform, and are the first practical,…

[als-aargauer-unterwegs]

Villmergen - Wohlen retour Vollständiger Bericht bei: https://agu.li/1Y4 Nach dem Gewitter das Bünztal hinauf und wieder hinunter. Dabei völlig überraschend dem Osterhasen begegnet. Das GPS registrierte 52.2 KM und 369 Höhenmeter. .pf-button.pf-button-excerpt display: none;

[jacobhinkley]

Monero Community Is Funding Three Independent Audits of the Bulletproofs Implementation

Cryptocurrencies regularly undergo major changes as far as their code bases are concerned. For the Monero team, there is a big focus on implementing Bulletproofs into the existing code. With a strong focus on lower transaction fees, a higher throughput, and general quality improvements, Bulletproofs require proper audits, which in turn require funding.

The Monero Bulletproofs Audits

Given the major implications that Bulletproofs technology will have for the Monero ecosystem, a thorough vetting of this technology is more than warranted. With various developers working on this implementation, it is possible that certain aspects have been overlooked or can be improved upon. While the community could provide some valuable feedback in this regard, the developers are seeking external help as well.

More specifically, after polling the community, three independent auditing parties have been identified. Benedikt Bünz, QuarksLab, and Kudelski Security will be hired to conduct a proper test of Monero’s Bulletproofs implementation. When the results are compiled, they will be shared with the general public in an effort to preserve transparency. It is a smart strategy, as a fresh set of eyes can produce a lot of interesting information.

As one would expect, these three parties will not conduct their audits free of charge. That is only normal, as quality work requires compensation. In this case, Bünz has requested 36.4 XMR, as he prefers receiving Monero over dealing with fiat currencies. As for QuarksLab, the fee will be $20,625 and 91 XMR, half of which has already been paid. Kudelski Security is charging a $30,000 fee for this process, and the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund will convert the necessary XMR to USD at no additional cost.

The Monero community is being asked to contribute whatever they can spare to make these independent audits happen. In the past, every major development affecting Monero – either the code or services related to XMR – have been community-funded. This is also the best approach, as it eliminates the risk of investors trying to steer the future development of Monero in a completely different direction for financial gain.

So far, the funding effort is seemingly going according to plan. A total of 457 XMR will need to be raised to pay all three auditors, with 259.59 XMR already having been raised. It shouldn’t take too long to have the necessary funding in place, especially given the Monero community’s track record in this regard. After all, the development of Bulletproofs is in the entire community’s best interest.

It is worth mentioning that the total amount of XMR being raised includes a buffer to account for any major price volatility that can and will occur in the meantime. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the community to pool these funds. This is a pretty interesting development for Monero in general, as Bulletproofs will be a key breakthrough for this anonymity-oriented cryptocurrency.

Monero Community Is Funding Three Independent Audits of the Bulletproofs Implementation published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions

[btc-current-blog]

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

[ad_1]

Excellent series of Tweets by Bünz about bulletproofs and quantum security

[ad_2] View Reddit by SamsungGalaxyPlayer – View Source

[weekinethereum]

August 2, 2018

News and Links

Protocol

Vitalik proposed a three-stage beacon chain plan. To make the roadmap more incrementalist, we assume a fixed validator set in stage 1, and introduce the dynasty transition in stage 3.

Sharding p2p POC in libp2p

Boneh, Bünz, Fisch: survey of 2 VDFs

Latest Casper standup

Casper v Ouroboros in two parts

Latest ewasm call

Fichter: Why is EVM on Plasma hard?    (Also: Parsec’s EVM on EVM)

Plasma Cash verification cost thread

Latest core devs call.  Lane’s notes

Everything you need to know about the Trinity Ethereum client - the history, why Python, and how it is good for research prototyping

Intro to the Nimbus Ethereum 2.0 client from Status

Stuff for developers

Liam Horne: Counterfactual state channel applications.  Github

Connext on real world implementation of virtual channels; currently live on Spankchain mainnet for testing

Etherlime v0.6 - dev framework based on ethers.js, faster compile and test

“A quick example of how to set up Truffle and Ethers.js with the new experimentalABIEncoderV2”

Ethereum gas golf talks from Nick Johnson and Zachary Williamson

whisper-tools stand-alone API wrapper over shh RPC calls

How to prepare your dapps for uPort’s standards based identity

Sourabh Niyogi’s Go implementation of Vitalik’s STARK code

Mobius ring signatures code

Why mainstream languages are no good at smart contract programming

TheGraph is now opensource

Brief EthQL tutorial

AnalyseEther - “real-time data analysis” in your browser

Péter Szilágyi warns of dapp hijacking using dormant service workers and localhost

ENS Toolkit, and ENS Q&A with Nick Johnson

Orion: private transaction manager for EEA spec in Java from PegaSys

video tutorial intro to Dapphub’s KLab debugger in K framework

Release

Geth v1.8.13 with Swarm v0.3.1 - maintenance release.  Combo geth/swarm releases from now on.

Live on mainnet

Enjin’s ERC1155 is live on mainnet to tokenize game assets.  FreeMyVunk lives!

Ecosystem

Devcon4 call for speakers, workshop leaders and breakout room hosts

Game theory behind FoMo3d and speculative exit scenarios

Open source block explorer call #10

Trusted execution environments for Ethereum nodes, from Intel’s Sanjay Bakshi and ConsenSys’s Andreas Freund

imToken 2.0

Gnosis Safe - also video of interacting with a dapp using Gnosis Safe

Governance and Standards

Eric Conner: a case for Ethereum block reward reduction.  There’s an Etherchain coinvote (hardly perfect, must use MyCrypto/MEW) on the subject where 50k ETH has vote nearly unanimously to decrease block rewards to miners.  There’s also proposal variations like 1276 (delete bomb, 2 ETH) and 1277 (2 ETH).  There’s wide support for issuance reduction, the question is about magnitude of reduction, how long should the bomb be delayed, and should an anti-ASIC measure be included.

signaling for Ethereum proposals should not be formalized

EIP1285: increase the Gcallstipend fee parameter in the CALL OPCODE from 2,300 to 3,500 gas

EIP1283: Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps

ERC1271: Standard signature validation method for contracts

ERC1288: Get contract return values from transaction recepts

Next hardfork issue tracker

Project Updates

Golem v0.17.0.   Also, guide to Trusted Computations, part 1

365 days of Iconomi platform - cool graphic recapping last year

Underwriters in Dharma protocol

DopeRaider launches on POANetwork and teaches people how to move assets

Dappos - point of sale Eth register for mobile

Reporters.chat to promote Augur reporting standards

MakerDAO governance risk framework, pt 2

Jarrad’s letter to Status

Digix currently has a coinvote on how much Digix is required to be a proposal moderator and how much the mod will be rewarded

Interviews, Podcasts, Videos, Talks 

Swarm Orange Summit videos

Lane Rettig talks governance and scalability on BlockCrunch

Dmitry Buterin podcast interview

Livepeer’s Eric Tang talks offchain computation on Zero Knowledge

Modular’s Chris Brown and Will Dias on Hashing It Out

More Dappcon vids are out, including my talk on governance

Binary District state channels event videos

  Tokens 

Neufund has a security token newsletter - this issue focused on exchanges

Livepeer open claim period has started.  Pay the gas to MerkleMine for others and get rewarded

Alex Van de Sande’s idea for tokenized sustainable communities on Reddit

Better information with curation markets slides

General

Validating on Polkadot POC2 when everyone has been slashed

List of Cosmos and Tendermint projects

Zilliqa’s Scilla language is open sourced

Binance buys Trust Wallet

EthNews interview with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce on her ETF dissent and being open to innovation

Bitcoin use in commerce is down more than 80% in last 9 months

John Backus argues filesharing teaches us to only decentralize what is necessary and how bittorrent came from behind to win

Blockchain innovation in Europe paper from EU Blockchain Forum

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note:

August 7 - Devcon4 tickets, wave 2

August 7 - Start of two month distributed hackathon from Giveth, Aragon, Swarm City and Chainshot

August 10-12 - ETHIndia hackathon (Bangalore)

August 10-12 - ENS workshop and hackathon (London)

August 22 - Maker DAO ‘Foundation Proposal’ vote

August 24-26 - Loom hackathon (Oslo, Norway)

September 6 - Security unconference (Berlin)

September 7-9 - ETHBerlin hackathon

September 7-9 - WyoHackathon (Wyoming)

September 8 - Ethereum Industry Summit (Hong Kong)

September 15-16 - Kiev DappDev hackathon

Oct 5-7 - TruffleCon in Portland

Oct 5-7 - ETHSanFrancisco hackathon

Oct 11 - Crypto Economics Security Conf (Berkeley)

Oct 22-24 - Web3Summit (Berlin)

Oct 26-28 - Status hackathon (Prague)

Oct 29 - Decentralized Insurance D1Conf (Prague)

Oct 30 - Nov 2 - Devcon4 (Prague)

Dec 7-9 - dGov distributed governance conf (Athens)

December - ETHSingapore hackathon

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[fmm85]

bitcoin payments. In an attempt to enhance anonymity, transactions are broadcast off the bitcoin blockchain and routed through encrypted communications.

But according to two academic papers published in March and April, relatively straightforward cyberattacks could unearth balances on the Lightning Network. Authors of the March paper also unraveled pathways and parties of hidden payments.

“The gap between the potential privacy properties of the Lightning Network and the actual ones is large. As it is designed right now, the Lightning Network opens the door for various attacks,” said Ania Piotrowska, a cryptography researcher at the University College London, which collaborated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the March study.

Nodes, building blocks of the Lightning Network, are software gateways that exchange bitcoin via payment channels. Both research teams, the other at the University of Luxembourg and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, conducted attacks on only public channels. According to a report in January from cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, 72.2 percent of Lightning Network channels are publicly announced, and 27.8 percent are kept private.

“As Lightning Network gains popularity, it is often touted as an alternative to bitcoin that is not only more scalable but also more private,” said Piotrowska, who also works at cryptocurrency privacy infrastructure startup Nym Technologies. “We felt that it was an interesting research question to study how private Lightning actually is.”

A raft of academic and corporate institutions have taken up Lightning Network development, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative to bitcoin satellite maker Blockstream, engineering group Lightning Labs and Square Crypto, the cryptocurrency unit of the publicly traded financial technology company Square.

In December, Bitfinex, a high-volume cryptocurrency exchange, opted to let customers trade bitcoin over the Lightning Network.

Three-pronged attack

The American and British researchers, a team of seven, carried out three attacks on the Lightning Network during the months of December, January and February. Two attacks targeted the Lightning Network’s test network and main network to determine balances. 

By forwarding payments with fake hashes – unique cryptographic identifiers of transactions – to channels opened with 132 test network nodes and six of the 10 largest main network nodes, the first balance attack accessed the balances of 619 test network channels and 678 main network channels.

The counterfeit payment spamming was stopped when error messages went away, a sign that actual channel amounts had been matched.

At the start of the first balance attack, 4,585 test network channels and 1,293 main network channels were trialed from 3,035 test network nodes sharing 8,665 channels and 6,107 main network nodes sharing 35,069 channels.

The second balance attack also discovered the balances of randomly selected main network channels in a process of elimination with error messages. However, payment hashes were routed through two channels the researchers opened with two intermediate channels that sat between one start and one end channel.

Piecing together changes in balances learned from the first two attacks, the third attack constructed snapshots of the Lightning Network at different time intervals to detect payment movements and their senders, recipients and amounts.

“Identifying the sender and recipient means that we identify them according to their public keys and any other information linked to the node,” such as an IP address, a numerical string that tags the location of an electronic device that connects to the internet, she said. Public keys are handed out freely between parties in payment interactions; private keys that are guarded closely and that give ownership access of funds were not extracted.

Piotrowska noted that, owing to ethical concerns, the third attack was performed on a simulation of the Lightning Network.

Attack analysis

Mariusz Nowostawski, a computer scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and one of four authors of the April paper, said the March paper’s first balance attack is a derivative of “an older, known method” and that the second balance attack, while new, is limited to small-scale attacks.

The second balance attack “requires opening two channels for each single channel being probed, which is extremely costly as those opening and closing channels need to be on-chain,” Nowostawski said. “And it requires the balance in one of the channels to be placed on the side of the node being probed,” risking the attacker’s funds.

To stave off the loss of funds, an external liquidity service – similar to the Bitrefill liquidity provider used in the March paper attack – needs to fund the channel. Even so, the balance attack falls flat if a channel refuses to accept a channel opening, Nowostawski said.

The balance attack studied by the Luxembourger and Norwegian researchers doesn’t expend resources or rely on intermediate channels, said Nowostawski. The attack is also an error-message-reading algorithm that probes channels, but supposedly on a larger and faster scale that reduces new channel openings, fund lock-up time and contact with the bitcoin blockchain.

Benedikt Bünz, a Stanford University Applied Cryptography Group researcher who has partnered with cryptocurrency tracing company Chainalysis on blockchain research studies, called the papers important to privacy in cryptocurrencies.

“For strong and good privacy, cryptographic solutions such as zero-knowledge proofs and confidential transactions are needed,” said Bünz. Zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic structure, could facilitate payments that don’t leave traces of information behind with another party.

Read both papers below:

Disclosure strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read More

The post Researchers Surface Privacy Vulnerabilities in Bitcoin Lightning Network Payments appeared first on Future Money Matters.

[abigailswager]

Monero Community Crowdfunded Audition Campaign for the Bulletproof Implementation

New Post has been published on https://monerobrokers.com/monero-community-crowdfunded-audition-campaign-for-the-bulletproof-implementation-2/

Monero Community Crowdfunded Audition Campaign for the Bulletproof Implementation

On the threshold of the Bulletproof technology implementation, Monero community was polled about auditing this process. The issue is that there are many developers are working on this feeding-in, and some points could be overseen or even lost. Moreover, there might be some aspects which could be improved.

For this purposes, it was decided to invite third-party specialists and companies for an independent audit. The Monero Community have chosen three contractors: Benedikt Bünz, QuarksLab, and Kudelski Security. The complete audit from all three companies will cost about 130 XMR and around $50,000.

As far as XMR is community-based and community-funded currency, Monero community was asked to contribute whatever they can to help these audits happen. Most of the community members welcomed this appeal, and the crowdfunding of the examinations has started. There are 457 XMR total to be raised and by May 17th, the community already collected 259.59 XMR.

The Bulletproof technology is going to reduce Monero transaction fees’ size by 80%. It will solve two main Monero developers’ problems at once: reduce the size and fees of the transactions.

The post Monero Community Crowdfunded Audition Campaign for the Bulletproof Implementation appeared first on Monero.org – Everything you need about Monero (XMR).

[cryptswahili]

Lightning Network Co-Creator Is Designing a Scaling Solution Called Utreexo

A blockchain researcher has been working on a scaling effort for the unspent transaction output set found in the Bitcoin protocol. According to Tadge Dryja’s recently published description of research, the software engineer is working on a dynamic accumulator called Utreexo. The project could theoretically allow network participants to verify the state of the chain’s consensus rules with smaller sets of cryptographic proof.

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Utreexo Could Allow Bitcoin Full Nodes on a Mobile Phone

Tadge Dryja from MIT and the Digital Currency Initiative.

A few years after Bitcoin was born, developers and network participants discovered the protocol needed to scale in order to facilitate transactions for a growing number of users. The software stores a record of every transaction and all the newly minted coins within a distributed ledger. This makes full node maintenance cumbersome over time and a big reason for this is because of a collection of Unspent Transaction Outputs or UTXOs. In order to help solve the scaling issue, Tadge Dryja from MIT has written a description of the current research project he’s been working on called Utreexo. The protocol is a hash-based dynamic accumulator, which essentially brings the millions of UTXOs recorded onchain down to under a kilobyte. “There is no trusted setup or loss of security; instead the burden of keeping track of funds is shifted to the owner of those funds,” Dryja’s description explains.

“With Utreexo, though, rather than having to store the entirety of the bitcoin state, bitcoin holders could simply verify if it is correct using a cryptographic proof,” Dryja’s paper adds. “This approach could minimize storage requirements to the extent that it might even be possible to run bitcoin on a mobile phone.”

Millions of Unspent Outputs Represented in Under a Kilobyte

Dryja’s Utreexo and accumulators have been getting some attention in recent months. In the podcast episode Grey Mirror #1, host Rhys Lindmark interviewed Tadge Dryja about the project, which has slowly become a prototype. Dryja explained to Lindmark how blockchains could bootstrap upgrades in a “non-fork” fashion by using a bridge node to Utreexo. Furthermore, Stanford University cryptographers Ben Fisch, Dan Boneh, and Benedikt Bünz have also written a paper that involves accumulators. The study discusses batching techniques for accumulators with applications to IOPs and stateless blockchains. In addition to the group’s 46-page paper, the research studies vector commitments in groups of unknown order.

Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains written by Ben Fisch, Dan Boneh, and Benedikt Bünz looks at accumulators in a different manner. 

With Utreexo, the protocol places the cost of maintaining the network “to the right place,” explains Dryja’s documentation. The millions of onchain transactions that have been the cause of many arguments could be maintained by shrinking the UTXO set down to a few kilobytes of proof. While some blockchain developers have discussed the Utreexo concept, engineers from other projects have been experimenting with different ideas as well. For instance, there’s been a number of conversations about Bloxroute, a company that claims it can provide blockchain networks far better efficiency by propagating blocks in a neutral manner. Additionally, there’s Jonathan Toomim’s Xthinner, which leverages the benefits of lexicographic transaction ordering (LTOR) on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network. Purportedly Xthinner can compress the information in blocks by 99.6 percent and Toomim’s other project Blocktorrent could be even more efficient. The torrenting protocol Blocktorrent breaks a block down into fractions and each chunk can be independently verified.

Accumulators May See Action on Another Chain Due to Stubborn Bitcoin Core Developers

Even though accumulators may be a long-term scalability solution, the idea has been discussed for over nine years with little advancement. Some believe accumulators will likely see the light of day with developers who are not so stubborn when it comes to scaling the protocol such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash programmers. BTC developers have been criticized by many for their refusal to raise the block size via a hard fork upgrade, while the developers’ soft fork to introduce segregated witness still has less than 40 percent adoption after more than a year. Accumulators were talked about during a Bitcoin Core Dev discussion on Dec. 18, however, and Pieter Wuille reviewed UTXO accumulators on Dec. 7.

There’s still a lot of work to be done with Utreexo, but Dryja has compiled some rough code. The Stanford programmers are working on their idea which is different to the MIT engineer’s work. There have been many scaling concepts announced over the last few months and 2019 might just be the year of scalability for several public blockchains.

What do you think about Tadge Dryja’s Utreexo project and the general concept of dynamic accumulators? Let us know what you think about this project in the comments section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Twitter, and Pixabay.

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