A magnificent view across the Black Sea from a sunny rooftop terrace in Odessa – it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful location for a blockchain conference. Guests and speakers from more than 20 countries were at the fifth Blockchain Incredible Party, BIP001, a leading cryptocurrency and blockchain event in eastern Europe. The event started only two years ago but has already…

I am delighted to see the recent news coverage about the Ouroboros paper being accepted to Crypto 17, the most prestigious cryptography event of the year. No other blockchain protocol, apart from Bitcoin, has achieved this level of academic peer review. This is recognition from the academic community that this paper is a serious contribution to cryptography, in being the first…

It is well known that randomness is a fundamental resource for secure cryptographic schemes. All common encryption and authentication schemes are only as secure as their randomness sources are good. Using a poor randomness source can basically render insecure every cryptographic scheme that would otherwise be secure. In many cases, it is sufficient to have a trustworthy local…

It took a little longer than expected but I finally made the trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In fact, I'm standing at a work desk by the window in Frankfurt airport waiting for my flight back to Dublin. I'm enjoying a gloriously sunny day here through the wall of glass. 

It was another productive trip, a lot has happened since the Team Grothendieck trips to Poland and St Petersburg. In our work to build a Scala client for Ethereum Classic there has been a lot of code written, a lot of understanding gained, and a couple of milestones reached: we now have the ability to download and execute blocks of transactions from the ETC chain. We have also evolved a lot as a…

TL;DR You want to avoid the next DAO-like disaster: so you want confidence that the system underpinning your cryptocurrency doesn’t have a hidden flaw that could be triggered at any time and render your assets worthless. To get that confidence you need a high assurance implementation of the system operating your cryptocurrency. Formal methods (mathematical specifications and…