At its heart, cryptography is the science of secure communication. We have all secrets, expectations of privacy and assertions of truth about messages we receive that require some notion of verification or quantification of trust. Cryptography provides us with a toolbox to better understand how to transmit and verify these artifacts of communication in the presence of an…

The Symphony of Blockchains is an interactive, visual and auditory exploration of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and the blockchain. It is an ongoing research initiative with a singular aim: to help bring about greater understanding of both blockchain technology and the ever expanding (and contracting) cryptocurrency marketplace. The term ‘blockchain’ is being increasingly found in…

A blog post on the Steemit website appeared recently making a number of claims regarding Ouroboros. The article contains several factual inaccuracies. For instance, it is claimed that “DPOS” in the Ouroboros paper stands for “delegated proof of stake”, while in fact, DPOS means “dynamic proof of stake”, or that the protocol requires a "2/3+" ratio of parties being honest, while…

Hotel Ginebra is a boutique hotel in Catalunya Square, which if you have visited Barcelona you will know is a prime location in the heart of the city. Guests can wake up in the morning to a great view of the city, but what they may not know is that the hotel has earned its place in history. It recently became the first business in the world to accept Ada, the Cardano…

In the third post in this series (part 1, part 2) on proof refinement, I'm going to show you how to properly handle bidirectionality in an elegant way. The technique we'll use is the replacement of lists and functions with a data structure called a telescope. This post will use Haskell exclusively, because of the limitations of JavaScript in presenting these things elegantly. I…