Why bitcoin matters (2014)

By Marc Andreessen
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/

The idea of smart contracts (1997)

By Nick Szabo


What is the meaning and purpose of "security"? How does it relate the the relationships we have? I argue that the formalizations of our relationships -- especially contracts -- provide the blueprint for ideal security.

Many kinds of contractual clauses (such as collateral, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher. A canonical real-life example, which we might consider to be the primitive ancestor of smart contracts, is the humble vending machine. Within a limited amount of potential loss (the amount in the till should be less than the cost of breaching the mechanism), the machine takes in coins, and via a simple mechanism, which makes a freshman computer science problem in design with finite automata, dispense change and product according to the displayed price. The vending machine is a contract with bearer: anybody with coins can participate in an exchange with the vendor. The lockbox and other security mechanisms protect the stored coins and contents from attackers, sufficiently to allow profitable deployment of vending machines in a wide variety of areas.

Smart contracts go beyond the vending machine in proposing to embed contracts in all sorts of property that is valuable and controlled by digital means. Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, often proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.

As another example, consider a hypothetical digital security system for automobiles. The smart contract design strategy suggests that we successively refine security protocols to more fully embed in a property the contractual terms which deal with it. These protocols would give control of the cryptographic keys for operating the property to the person who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. In the most straightforward implementation, the car can be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft.

If the car is being used to secure credit, strong security implemented in this traditional way would create a headache for the creditor - the repo man would no longer be able to confiscate a deadbeat's car. To redress this problem, we can create a smart lien protocol: if the owner fails to make payments, the smart contract invokes the lien protocol, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This protocol might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. A further reification would provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as account for hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.

In this process of successive refinement we've gone from a crude security system to a reified contract:

          (1) A lock to selectively let in the owner and
              exlude third parties;
          (2) A back door to let in the creditor;
          (3a) Creditor back door switched on only upon nonpayment
               for a certain period of time; and
          (3b) The final electronic payment permanently switches
               off the back door.
Mature security systems will be undertaking different behavior for different contracts. To continue with our example, if the automobile contract were a lease, the final payment would switch off leasee access; for purchase on credit, it would switch off creditor access. A security system, by successive redesign, increasingly approaches the logic of the contract which governs the rights and obligations covering the object, information, or computation being secured. Qualitatively different contractual terms, as well as technological differences in the property, give rise to the need for different protocols.
(Derived from "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks" , by Nick Szabo)

A related article discusses a formal language for analyzing contracts and specifying smart contracts.

http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/idea.html

The Byzantine Generals Problem (1982)

By Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~luca/cs174/byzantine.pdf

A basic glossary of terms for Bitcoin

A few short and simple definitions
https://tangelo.co/insights/blog/techs-must-have-reference-guide-to-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency

Rehabilitation Debtor: MtGox Co., Ltd

Rehabilitation Trustee: Nobuaki Kobayashi, Attorney-at-law
Announcement for Commencement of Filing Proofs of Rehabilitation Claim
https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/201808_announcement_en.pdf

BITCOIN - A Primer for Policymakers

BY JERRY BRITO AND ANDREA CASTILLO
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Brito_BitcoinPrimer.pdf

The Wired Guide To Quantum Computing

Everything you ever wanted to know about qbits, superpositioning, and spooky action at a distance.

AUTHOR: TOM SIMONITEBY TOM SIMONITE
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-quantum-computing?mbid=nl_082218_daily_list1_p1&CNDID=21012649

Plain text of Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin White Paper

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto

satoshin@gmx.com

www.bitcoin.org

Abstract.

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of
hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing
the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of
events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As
long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to
attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The
network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort
basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest
proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

1. Introduction
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as
trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for
most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot
avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the
minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions,
and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible
services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must
be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need.
A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties
can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments
over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers
from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In
this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed
timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The
system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any
cooperating group of attacker nodes.


Transactions
We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the
next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner
and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of
ownership.

The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of the owners did not double-spend
the coin. A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every
transaction for double spending. After each transaction, the coin must be returned to the mint to
issue a new coin, and only coins issued directly from the mint are trusted not to be double-spent.
The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the
company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank.
We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier
transactions. For our purposes, the earliest transaction is the one that counts, so we don't care
about later attempts to double-spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to
be aware of all transactions. In the mint based model, the mint was aware of all transactions and
decided which arrived first. To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be
publicly announced [1], and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the
order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that at the time of each transaction, the
majority of nodes agreed it was the first received.

Timestamp Server
The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a
hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a
newspaper or Usenet post [2-5]. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the
time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in
its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it.

Proof-of-Work
To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proofof-work
system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash [6], rather than newspaper or Usenet posts.
The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the
hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number
of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.
For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the
block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU
effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed
without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block
would include redoing all the blocks after it.
The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision
making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone
able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority
decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested
in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the
fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to
redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the
work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up
diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.
To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time,
the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of
blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.

5. Network
The steps to run the network are as follows:
1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.
3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the
chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.
Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on
extending it. If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block simultaneously, some
nodes may receive one or the other first. In that case, they work on the first one they received,
but save the other branch in case it becomes longer. The tie will be broken when the next proofof-work
is found and one branch becomes longer; the nodes that were working on the other
branch will then switch to the longer one.

Tx Tx ...
New transaction broadcasts do not necessarily need to reach all nodes. As long as they reach
many nodes, they will get into a block before long. Block broadcasts are also tolerant of dropped
messages. If a node does not receive a block, it will request it when it receives the next block and
realizes it missed one.

6. Incentive
By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned
by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides
a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them.
The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending
resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.
The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is
less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of
the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered
circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation
free.
The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

7. Reclaiming Disk Space
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before
it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash,
transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash.
Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do
not need to be stored.
A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are
generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems
typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of
1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in
memory.

Simplified Payment Verification
It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep
a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying
network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch
linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for
himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it,
and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it.
As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more
vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify
transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated
transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to
protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid
block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to
confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to
run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

9. Combining and Splitting Value
Although it would be possible to handle coins individually, it would be unwieldy to make a
separate transaction for every cent in a transfer. To allow value to be
.

10. Privacy
The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the
parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly
precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in
another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending
an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is
similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of
individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.
As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them
from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input
transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk
is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to
the same owner.

11. Calculations
We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain faster than the honest
chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such
as creating value out of thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. Nodes are
not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes will never accept a block
containing them. An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back
money he recently spent.
The race between the honest chain and an attacker chain can be characterized as a Binomial
Random Walk. The success event is the honest chain being extended by one block, increasing its
lead by +1, and the failure event is the attacker's chain being extended by one block, reducing the
gap by -1.
The probability of an attacker catching up from a given deficit is analogous to a Gambler's
Ruin problem. Suppose a gambler with unlimited credit starts at a deficit and plays potentially an
infinite number of trials to try to reach breakeven. We can calculate the probability he ever
reaches breakeven, or that an attacker ever catches up with the honest chain, as follows [8]:
p = probability an honest node finds the next block
q = probability the attacker finds the next block
qz = probability the attacker will ever catch up from z blocks behind

New Privacy Model
Traditional Privacy Model
Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks the
attacker has to catch up with increases. With the odds against him, if he doesn't make a lucky
lunge forward early on, his chances become vanishingly small as he falls further behind.
We now consider how long the recipient of a new transaction needs to wait before being
sufficiently certain the sender can't change the transaction. We assume the sender is an attacker
who wants to make the recipient believe he paid him for a while, then switch it to pay back to
himself after some time has passed. The receiver will be alerted when that happens, but the
sender hopes it will be too late.
The receiver generates a new key pair and gives the public key to the sender shortly before
signing. This prevents the sender from preparing a chain of blocks ahead of time by working on
it continuously until he is lucky enough to get far enough ahead, then executing the transaction at
that moment. Once the transaction is sent, the dishonest sender starts working in secret on a
parallel chain containing an alternate version of his transaction.
The recipient waits until the transaction has been added to a block and z blocks have been
linked after it. He doesn't know the exact amount of progress the attacker has made, but
assuming the honest blocks took the average expected time per block, the attacker's potential
progress will be a Poisson distribution with expected value:

12. Conclusion
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.


References
[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal
trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.
[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no
2, pages 99-111, 1991.
[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping,"
In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.
[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.
[6] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure,"
http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf, 2002.
[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and
Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.
[8] W. Feller, "An introduction to probability theory and its applications," 1957.

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable

Ittay Eyal and Emin G¨un Sirer
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf

Analysis of Large-Scale Bitcoin Mining Operations

(or how Bitcoin miners make $845 Million a Year)
http://www.allied-control.com/publications/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdf

Bitcoin and The Age of Bespoke Silicon

Michael Bedford Taylor University of California, San Diego
https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib/pdf/taylor2013bitcoin.pdf

How the bitcoin protocol actually works

By Michael Nielsen:
http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/

Stephen Wolfram - Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered

https://youtu.be/nUCwtLTUPQ4

Ever wonder how bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) actually work?

From 3Blue1Brown:

https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4

How can Bitcoin fail?

• Bug discovered or coding error
• Encryption broken
• Hacking attack on Bitcoin nodes and Wallets
• Internet access cut off for countries - undersea cables and satellite
• Malware / virus deletes blockchain on nodes
• New cryptographic discover renders Bitcoin obsolete
• Not physically backed asset - e.g. Gold (even though energy used)
• No real use case
• Quantum computing breaks encryption
• Regulation by Governments with tax policy
• Regulation by Central banks not allowing Fiat into the Bitcoin ecosystem and out of the Bitcoin ecosystem
• Satoshi Nakamoto identity revealed or sells Bitcoin
• Trust issues - no trust, no confidence, trust broken

Motherboard Mother Earth - great read from Neal Stephenson 1996

How vulnerable is the internet and the cables used for data?
http://www.neverendingbooks.org/DATA/stephenson.pdf

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm ECDSA

The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm ECDSA

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.9475&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-4

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-4
Secure Hash Standard (SHS)
https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910977

Great resource: collection of bibliography links for cryptocurrency course

Here are links to research papers. These were listed in the Princeton University cryptocurrency course:

https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910977

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.9475&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf

https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/ebf/05db7df4f31840f0a873d6ea14dcc28d.pdf

https://fc13.ifca.ai/proc/1-2.pdf

https://cs.jhu.edu/~sdoshi/crypto/papers/shamirturing.pdf

https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/papers/2015_ccs.pdf

https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib/pdf/taylor2013bitcoin.pdf

http://www.allied-control.com/publications/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdf

http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BMCNKF15-IEEESP-bitcoin.pdf

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf

https://www.econinfosec.org/archive/weis2013/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenWEIS2013.pdf

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Brito_BitcoinPrimer.pdf

https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.pdf

http://antoanthongtin.vn/Portals/0/UploadImages/kiennt2/Sach/Sach-CSDL4/D039.pdf

https://www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh/pub/secsem/chaum1985bigbrother.pdf

https://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsp200t.pdf

https://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf
http://www.std.org/~msm/common/memorybound.pdf

http://hashcash.org/papers/cuckoo.pdf

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/784.pdf

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ericz/predictionmarkets.pdf

https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/PromisePredMkt.pdf
https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf

http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf

http://blockchainlab.com/pdf/Ethereum_white_paper-a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/702.pdf

How to Lose $3 Billion of Bitcoin in India

Investors in India lost an alleged $3B of Bitcoin, in what could be one of the country’s biggest cryptocurrency scams


Archana Chaudhary and Jeanette Rodrigues
August 9, 2018, 10:00 PM
Accusations of tax evasion and police corruption, a kidnapper who was kidnapped, a fugitive politician, and billions in bitcoin lost. This is crypto-trading Gujarat-style.

The ingredients are part of an investigation in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state into allegations that investors poured cash into a bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme that could exceed the country’s largest banking scandal. The fallout extends as far as Texas and has embroiled a former lawmaker, tarnishing Modi’s ruling party months before an election.

Source:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/cryptokidnapping-or-how-to-lose-3-billion-of-bitcoin-in-india

Crypto Technicals Flash Pain Ahead, Eye Bitcoin at $4,000

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/crypto-technicals-flash-more-pain-ahead-eye-bitcoin-at-4-000

Good long read from Arstechnica... Bitcoin primer

Want to really understand how bitcoin works? Here’s a gentle primer

Ars goes deep on the breakthrough online payment network.

Timothy B. Lee - 12/15/2017, 12:35 PM

The soaring price of bitcoin—the virtual currency is now worth more than $250 billion—has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks. But the real significance of bitcoin isn't just its rising value. It's the technological breakthrough that allowed the network to exist in the first place.

Bitcoin's still anonymous inventor, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, figured out a completely new way for a decentralized network to reach a consensus about a shared transaction ledger. This innovation made possible the kind of fully decentralized electronic payment systems that cypherpunks had dreamed about for decades.

Continue reading here:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/how-bitcoin-works/

SEC Postpones Decision on Bitcoin ETF Listing to September

SEC Postpones Decision on Bitcoin ETF Listing to September.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has postponed a decision on whether to allow the listing of an exchange-traded fund backed by Bitcoin.

The agency now has until Sept. 30 to “approve or disapprove, or institute proceedings to determine whether to disapprove” a proposed rule change from Cboe Global Markets Inc. that would allow the fund from VanEck Associates Corp. and SolidX Partners Inc. to list, the SEC said in a statement. An initial deadline was due to expire next week.

The SEC’s delay is another blow to crypto-currency enthusiasts after the regulator denied an exchange’s request to list a similar fund run by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss late last month. Some had argued that VanEck’s proposal was more likely to gain approval thanks to plans for a high minimum share price that would discourage retail investors, and insurance. The Commission had received more than 1,300 comments on the proposed rule change as of Aug. 6, it said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-07/sec-postpones-decision-on-vaneck-bitcoin-etf-to-september

Read this book written in 1999

Cryptonomicon - by Neal Stephenson

This book is all about crptocurrency and cryptography. Great read!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816.Cryptonomicon

Here is further info about  the book:

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, crypt analyst extraordinaire, and gung-ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Visualisation...start of Bitcoin

Here is an interesting interactive graphic.

It shows the entire six-year history of all bitcoin transactions – as recorded in the 35 gigabyte blockchain ledger. 

What insights can be extracted from data, and why are we doing this? Elliptic is working to counter the illicit use of bitcoin, by providing businesses with tools that can analyse cryptocurrency payments and determine whether they are likely to be proceeds of crime. By identifying dark marketplaces, known thefts and other illicit activity on the blockchain we can help businesses to prevent money laundering.


https://info.elliptic.co/hubfs/big-bang/bigbang-v1.html?t=1533042584917

Analysis Websites....

Here are a couple of websites for analysis of transactions.

Chainalysis
https://www.chainalysis.com

Elliptic
https://www.elliptic.co

Could Satoshi Nakamoto be...

There are many theories. Is it one person? Is it a group of people?

Here are the top names that people believe could be Satoshi Nakamoto:

Hal Finney
Many people believe that Hal Finney, the first person to receive a bitcoin transaction, was actually Satoshi Nakamoto. If so, the mystery of the founder’s identity may never be solved, as Finney passed away in 2014 from ALS.

A Russian or Chinese agent
The Obama administration was concerned that Satoshi was an agent of Russia or China — that Bitcoin might be weaponized against us in the future. Knowing the source would help the administration understand their motives.

The CIA/NSA
A group named CIA Project claims that bitcoin is a creation of the CIA or NSA. While the group provided “evidence,” such as stating the name, Satoshi Nakamoto, roughly translates to “Central Intelligence” in Japanese, their perspective is considered to be no more than a conspiracy theory.

Nick Szabo
A reclusive American, deeply involved in the bitcoin project, released a blog expressing interest in the technology before Bitcoin’s release, but later reposted it to alter the publishing date. After the blog post about bit gold was determined to be from before bitcoins release, researchers at Aston University compared his writing style to Satoshi Nakamoto’s. According to Jack Grieve, a lecturer who led the project effort, the similarities were “uncanny.”

A Group of Companies
Some bitcoin users have suggested (jokingly) that Satoshi Nakamoto could actually be a group of four Asian technology companies: Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi, and Motorola. The name can be created by taking the “sa” from Samsung, “toshi” from Toshiba, “naka” from Nakamichi, and “moto” from Motorola.

https://bitcoinblockchaincryptodigitalassets.blogspot.com/2018/08/free-book-princeton-university.html

Mt. Gox - Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange

Here is an interesting read. This is all about an exchange that was hacked. The name is/was Mt. Gox - Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.

http://fortune.com/longform/bitcoin-mt-gox-hack-karpeles/

Mt. Gox and the Surprising Redemption of Bitcoin’s Biggest Villain
He led the world's largest Bitcoin exchange before a mysterious heist made it go bust. As clues emerge and Bitcoin's price surges, Mark Karpelès is on the hunt for answers.
By Jen Wieczner
April 19, 2018

The moment that would change the history of Mt. Gox came without so much as a beep. Mark Karpelès, the CEO of what until recently had been the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, was finally alone, save for his tabby cat, in his palatial penthouse with a panoramic view of Tokyo. It was the evening of March 7, 2014, and Karpelès had barely slept in the week since Mt. Gox had sought bankruptcy protection, announcing that 850,000 of its Bitcoins, worth some $473 million at the time—and representing 7% of all Bitcoins then in existence—had somehow disappeared. With protesters and camera crews swarming in front of Mt. Gox’s office and the price of Bitcoin in free fall, the usually unflappable Frenchman had been confined to a self-imposed house arrest, subsisting on the buttery pastries he liked to bake and reading the hate mail that flooded in from all corners of the Internet—most of it accusing him of stealing the money himself. Today the Mt. Gox hack remains the worst disaster in Bitcoin’s short history.

It wasn’t until his lawyers had gone home for the day that Karpelès could retreat to his computer, and that’s when he noticed the shocking number on his screen. Following his company’s collapse, he’d spent days methodically double-checking Mt. Gox’s old digital wallets, where the secret alphanumeric keys for accessing Bitcoins are stored. One after another—a dozen so far—the wallets had come up empty. But this time, when the blockchain-scanning program finished running after six hours, it had silently served up an unexpected result: He’d found 200,000 Bitcoins, stashed away in an archived file in the cloud—apparently forgotten and untouched for three years.

Mark Karpelès in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. The former Mt. Gox CEO, who once felt safe leaving his laptop on a park bench, refused to set down his bag for fear of theft.
Mark Karpelès in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. The former Mt. Gox CEO, who once felt safe leaving his laptop on a park bench, refused to set down his bag for fear of theft. Photographed by Eric Rechsteiner for Fortune
In a series of conversations with Fortune, Karpelès shared for the first time the full details of what he says really happened in the final days of Mt. Gox—including his account of how he stumbled on the 200,000 Bitcoins.

The surprise discovery would turn out to be, to this day, the only hope Mt. Gox customers have of getting their money back. It’s been proved that the other 650,000 missing Bitcoins were stolen—we now know, by various hackers. But Karpelès continues to be one of the most infamous figures in cryptocurrency. And his legal fate is uncertain, even as new evidence has emerged that largely exonerates him.

Ironically, today Karpelès doesn’t view the retrieval of the 200,000 Bitcoins as a lucky break. They’ve become such a subject of contention, in fact, that he wonders whether it might have been better if they’d remained lost. “At the time, I felt finding these was a good thing for everyone,” recalls Karpelès, now 32, his French accent still strong after nearly nine years in Japan. “But now this is also the main reason why we are stuck fighting.”

To many, the belated revelation seemed too good to be true—making the unemotional programmer-turned-mogul look even guiltier. Was he just coughing up his go-bag in an attempt to wiggle out of trouble? Soon, they had even more reason to suspect him: Leaked trading records suggested that what could only be an internal Mt. Gox account—widely known today as the “Willy bot”—was artificially inflating its account balance and using the money to buy Bitcoins. When Mt. Gox ran low on Bitcoins, Willy helped make up the shortfall. Sometimes its trades went the other way, selling borrowed Bitcoins to generate cash. Critics speculate that it was a fraudulent, if failed, exercise to keep Mt. Gox afloat.

That suspicious activity by the Willy bot led to Karpelès’s arrest in August 2015 on charges of manipulating electronic data; he admitted in court last summer to running what he called the “obligation exchange” but disputes doing anything illegal. After spending almost a year in jail, Karpelès is currently on trial in Tokyo, facing criminal allegations such as embezzlement and breach of trust, all unrelated to the missing Bitcoins.

But it was an unforeseen twist that today is causing Karpelès the greatest angst. Between the time Mt. Gox shut down and when it entered liquidation in April 2014, the price of Bitcoin had plummeted more than 20% to $483. It would be over two and a half years before Bitcoin would regain its previous high—long enough that many Mt. Gox victims didn’t even bother filing a claim for what they considered an insignificant sum. Then early last year, Bitcoin finally broke its old record. By late May, it was trading at nearly $2,200, making Mt. Gox’s remaining Bitcoins—202,185 to be exact—worth more than everything it owed in claims. When the Bitcoin price peaked at $20,000 in December, the value of Mt. Gox’s assets (by then including Bitcoin derivatives such as Bitcoin Cash) ballooned to $4.4 billion—nearly 10 times the amount Mt. Gox said it lost in the first place. “The fact that you have a bankruptcy where the only asset that it owns goes up by 5,000%, that’s pretty unprecedented,” says Daniel Kelman, a lawyer and Mt. Gox creditor who spent a year in Tokyo working on the case.

After months studying Japan’s bankruptcy code while in solitary confinement, Karpelès knew there was a wrinkle: Under the law, most of that excess would return to shareholders of Mt. Gox, of which he held 88%. At current prices, the windfall would make him a billionaire. It would also mean an interminable nightmare of lawsuits and threats that Karpelès—who is also in personal bankruptcy—is desperate to avoid. He says he’d happily give the money back if it came to him, but the estimated 60% tax triggered in the process would be catastrophic.

“I never expected to get anything out of this,” Karpelès tells me when we meet in Tokyo in March. “It would bring more trouble than anything.”

We’re on the second floor of a Japanese café, in a stuffy meeting room that Karpelès says is not much bigger than his jail cell. Deprived of a computer behind bars, he passed time by measuring the room using the length of his notebook. (After his release, Karpelès sent friends a chart of the 70 pounds he’d lost while detained.) It’s the first day in Tokyo that finally feels like spring, cherry blossoms in bloom, but he has holed up here in the café because it’s roughly equidistant from the offices of his various lawyers, as well as the bankruptcy trustee, whom he meets with regularly out of a sense of “duty” to his former customers. He’s been so busy, he says, he didn’t have time to shave that morning.

Karpelès took control of Mt. Gox—the name is an acronym for Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange, after the trading card game that inspired the original site—in 2011 from founder Jed McCaleb. Employees don’t remember Karpelès ever seeming fazed about anything: He took meetings from a vibrating massage chair and churned out combs using a 3D printer he’d bought for the office. His hallmark reply to questions: “Should be fine.”

But he’s lately developed a sense of gallows humor uncharacteristic of his Mt. Gox days. Even if he wanted to buy Bitcoin today, he doubts he could find an exchange that would take his money, he laughs, and notes that it’s been a few months since he’s received any death threats—“a new record.” He turns serious, though, when he recounts the sleepless nights in February 2014 when he says he first discovered that all of Mt. Gox’s Bitcoins were missing. “I think this really is the worst experience for anyone to have in life,” he says. Still, he’s not sure he could have done the job better. “If I knew at the time what I know today, I would have done things differently, of course,” he says with a practiced tone. “But based on the information I had at the time, and the situation at the time, I still think that I’ve done the best I could do with what I had.”

The question of what Karpelès knew, and when, though, remains more of a mystery than even who stole the coins. Bitcoin’s public ledger, or blockchain, allows anyone to trace the path of transactions, showing the wallets where Mt. Gox’s Bitcoins went. But the same blockchain analysis, multiple experts have confirmed, has also revealed an unsettling fact: By mid-2013, Mt. Gox had already lost all its Bitcoins—eight months before it admitted so publicly.

The timing of this insolvency, analysis shows, coincided with the Willy bot kicking into high gear—perhaps providing a hint as to Karpelès’s true motivations. “I feel that this is a reaction to this revelation that okay, all the money is gone,” says Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, which was hired by the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee to investigate the Bitcoins’ disappearance. Yet it’s also why he doesn’t believe Karpelès was planning to run away with the 200,000 Bitcoins. “I think that had he found them before he went bankrupt, he would never have gone bankrupt,” says Gronager. Rather, he says, Karpelès would have used the hoard to cover his losses.



When Mt. Gox froze Bitcoin withdrawals in 2014, a customer named Kolin Burges hopped a flight from London to Tokyo. For more than two weeks, until Mt. Gox declared bankruptcy, he kept vigil outside the exchange’s headquarters, holding a sign reading, “MTGOX WHERE IS OUR MONEY?” Other protesters soon joined him, demonstrating the frustration of Mt. Gox customers worldwide.

Kim Nilsson was just as vexed, but standing in the snow wasn’t his style. A modest Swedish software engineer with a goatee and a quiet voice, Nilsson, who also owned Bitcoins at Mt. Gox, had never before worked on blockchain technology. But he had a reputation for getting to the bottom of the toughest software bugs; in his off-time, he’d been known to beat all the levels of Super Mario Bros. 2 in an afternoon sitting. And that’s how he approached Mt. Gox: “It was basically just the world’s biggest puzzle at the time—like whoever solves this, imagine the recognition.”

Kim Nilsson, the software engineer who cracked the Mt. Gox case, standing on the street near Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.
Kim Nilsson, the software engineer who cracked the Mt. Gox case, standing on the street near Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. Photographed by Eric Rechsteiner for Fortune
He teamed up with some other Mt. Gox customers to launch WizSec, a blockchain security firm dedicated to cracking the case. But while the company quickly dissolved, Nilsson stayed on the case in secret, teaching himself blockchain analysis and painstakingly tracing the money stolen from Mt. Gox. Although Nilsson started off investigating Karpelès’s role in the theft, he soon realized the CEO was just as eager as he was to know what happened. At a time when Karpelès needed friends most, the WizSec team scored an invite to his apartment by offering to bring the Frenchman the ingredients he needed to bake his famous apple quiche. Soon, Karpelès was feeding Nilsson internal Mt. Gox data that could help solve the case. “I wish I had stolen the money, because then I could just give it back,” Karpelès told them at the time.

Over the next four years, Nilsson estimates he spent a year-and-a-half’s worth of full-time hours pursuing the Mt. Gox hackers. He’s never been paid for his work; his 12.7 Bitcoin claim at Mt. Gox makes him one of its smallest creditors. To J. Maurice, who helped found WizSec but left the company early on and was not involved in the investigation, Nilsson’s effort epitomizes the virtues of Bitcoin—a decentralized system free of government control, which relies instead on individual users to sustain it. “Kim is humble, he doesn’t brag, he doesn’t even want to get rich. He’s just working hard on something for years as his passion project,” Maurice says. “That’s what Bitcoin is.”

By early 2016, Nilsson had a suspect. As he tracked the stolen funds, he saw that, of the 650,000 Bitcoins reported stolen from Mt. Gox, 630,000 had gone straight into wallets controlled by the same person. That person also had an account at Mt. Gox, associated with the username WME. Then Nilsson stumbled across an old post in an online Bitcoin forum in which someone with the handle WME had thrown a tantrum, complaining that another cryptocurrency exchange had frozen his funds. “Give [me] my CLEAN MONEY!” read the post. In the process, WME dropped clues that he owned some of the Bitcoin wallets in question. But the big break came when the same user posted a letter from his lawyer, his first and last name visible for the whole world to see. Nilsson, as he routinely did with his findings, dashed off an email to Gary Alford, a special agent with the IRS in New York who has helped catch cybercriminals.

Then one scorching day last July, police stormed a beach in Greece to arrest a Russian citizen vacationing with his family. U.S. federal prosecutors charged Alexander Vinnik, a 38-year-old IT specialist, with laundering 530,000 of the stolen Mt. Gox Bitcoins through his WME wallets and other accounts. They also accused him of helping to run the exchange BTC-e, whose primary purpose was allegedly to launder money. It is plausible, investigators say, that BTC-e was founded specifically to launder funds stolen from Mt. Gox. Blockchain analysis shows that the hack that devastated Mt. Gox began in autumn 2011, around the time BTC-e started up. Keys to Mt. Gox’s “hot wallet”—its online Bitcoin repository—were stolen and copied, compromising the exchange’s deposit addresses. So for the next two years, in nine out of 10 instances, coins were being stolen as soon as they came in, says Chainalysis’ Gronager, who is also a creditor: “It meant that you had a hole in the bottom of the well, and someone was just draining money.”

Karpelès claims he never noticed because the hackers stole small amounts at a time, and the balances generally seemed to move upward. “Bitcoin didn’t exactly decrease,” he says. “It’s just that they didn’t increase as much as they should.”

Nilsson, who believes he has convincingly linked Vinnik to at least 100,000 more Mt. Gox Bitcoins than the feds allege, still doesn’t know whether he helped the government’s investigation or simply confirmed its conclusions. With Vinnik fighting extradition from Greece and five outstanding defendants whose names remain redacted in the U.S. indictment, the IRS won’t comment on the “active and ongoing” investigation. But Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor who signed off on the indictment, says Vinnik’s use of Bitcoin helps clearly connect him to the crime: “At first blush what seemed unsolvable turned out to be traceable through the use of digital currency.”

For Karpelès, Vinnik’s arrest reinforced a long-held theory: that Russian Bitcoin exchange administrators were behind a series of ­denial-of-service and other cyberattacks that hit Mt. Gox in 2011. Says Karpelès, “What he did, Mt. Gox is a victim of this, which means that all creditors are victims of this, and I am too a victim of this.”

Vinnik, who has denied the charges, has not been charged with stealing from Mt. Gox. But the magnitude and duration of his involvement points to some familiarity with the thieves whose profits he was allegedly laundering: “I assume at least he knows where to send the check,” says Nilsson.

Still, there’s an ironic punch line to the case: Because the stolen Bitcoins were sold right away, allegedly by Vinnik and long before Mt. Gox disclosed the hack, victims lost much more, in dollar value, than the hackers ever made—which, according to Chainalysis, was only about $20 million.

And as soon as the Bitcoins were converted to cash, the blockchain trail was broken. That means that even if authorities seize Bitcoins from the suspects, there won’t be anything to prove they’re from Mt. Gox. Sean Hays, a creditor in Arizona who says his 338 Bitcoin claim would be “life-changing,” adds, “I’ll be glad to have part of it back, but I think there will always be the hunt for where’s the rest?”

But for Burges, the key question that inspired his protest has finally been answered. “We know where the coins went, and we won’t get them back,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s solved.”

For almost four years, Josh Jones assumed he’d eventually receive his rightful portion of his nearly 44,000 Bitcoins locked inside Mt. Gox. By mid-2017, Bitcoin’s price was soaring, and Mt. Gox had enough to pay out the $430 million it owed in claims several times over. Then last September, Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi, a top restructuring lawyer also representing Takata in the airbag-maker’s bankruptcy, broke the news: Under Japanese bankruptcy law, the value of creditors’ claims were capped at what they were worth back in 2014: $483 per Bitcoin. “That’s just crazy,” says Jones, who held most of the coins on behalf of his clients at Bitcoin Builder, the service he built to facilitate arbitrage trading at Mt. Gox in its final weeks. “That can’t be how it’s going to work out.”

But while there was little Jones could do back home in Santa Monica, another major creditor took it upon himself to ensure the Bitcoins would be fully divvied up among Mt. Gox victims. Richard Folsom, an American who worked for Bain & Co. in Tokyo before founding one of the first private equity shops in Japan, hired the biggest Japanese law firm and came up with a plan: What if Mt. Gox wasn’t technically bankrupt anymore? Their petition for “civil rehabilitation” of Mt. Gox, filed in November, is now pending before the Tokyo District Court; an outside examiner recommended in its favor in February. Shin Fukuoka, the partner at Nishimura & Asahi leading the effort, is confident it will be approved, as early as the end of April. “We think that the court has sufficient understanding about the problems in the case of proceeding with bankruptcy,” Fukuoka says.

Those problems, of course, include the fact that the majority of Mt. Gox’s assets would otherwise accrue to Mark Karpelès. “Such an outcome would be a travesty,” says Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, the San Francisco–based Bitcoin exchange appointed to help investigate and distribute Mt. Gox claims (and himself a substantial creditor).

If Fukuoka’s plan works, it would be the first time in Japan that a business “abolished” in bankruptcy was rehabilitated, he says: “These are very unique circumstances.” In a traditional civil rehabilitation, once the court gives the green light, it typically takes six months for the plan to be finalized—meaning optimistically, creditors could begin to get paid, preferably in Bitcoins, as soon as late this year. Fukuoka says he’s also considering mandating further investigation into the stolen Bitcoins as part of the rehab plan, in hopes more will be recovered. (A $75 million lawsuit from CoinLab that has held up the bankruptcy process could be sidestepped by setting aside a legal reserve fund in the meantime, he adds.) It would be an extraordinary outcome for creditors like Thomas Braziel, managing partner of New York–based hedge fund B.E. Capital Management, who has bought up $1 million worth of claims at 80¢ on the dollar, believing he will turn a profit no matter what. “Of course, if the rehabilitation happens, it’s a bonanza, and you make eight, nine, 10 times your money,” Braziel says.

That would be a relief to Mt. Gox’s disgraced CEO, who says he’s had enough of the cryptocurrency business to last a lifetime: “The only thing I’m touching related to cryptocurrency is how to solve this bankruptcy. Nothing more,” says Karpelès. Besides, he has lost faith in the initial promise of digital money: “Bitcoin right now is, I believe, doomed.”

Since his release from jail two summers ago, Karpelès has been moving apartments every few months out of concerns for his own safety. During three months of all-day interrogations while detained, he refused to confess to the accusations Japanese authorities threw at him—including, at one point, that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious founder. Still, despite what he feels is a weak case against him, he thinks the odds are he’ll be found guilty, at least during this first trial; Japan, which has a more than 99% conviction rate, is also one of a few countries that allows prosecutors to appeal an acquittal twice. In a year or two, he could be sent back behind bars. “After I came out, I felt like in a kind of dream, like I didn’t feel things were real,” he says, over a slice of cake with cream and cherries. “Even today I’m not sure yet.”

Karpelès, though, is not on trial for what even his sympathizers fault him for the most: lying about Mt. Gox’s insolvency. “When Mt. Gox didn’t have any of the coins, he was getting new deposits from other customers to pay off other people—kind of like a Bernie Madoff,” says Kelman, the lawyer.

For now, Karpelès, who’s never been to the United States (and isn’t allowed to leave Japan while on trial), is leveraging his mastery of Japanese and the country’s formal business customs. The arrest of Vinnik has made it easier to find work, he says, by lifting some blame from Karpelès. Even so, the taint of Mt. Gox follows him. “He is unhirable,” says Mike Kayamori, the CEO of Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Quoine.

Yet earlier this year, Mark Karpelès landed a big new job: chief technology officer at London Trust Media, a Denver-based corporation that runs the largest virtual private network (VPN) service in the world. It has recently been expanding into cryptocurrency-related ventures. “I am more than willing to give a second chance to Mark in this fight’s critical hour,” says Andrew Lee, cofounder and chairman of London Trust Media, who also briefly ran Mt. Gox’s U.S. operations.

Even if Mt. Gox’s rehabilitation succeeds, the company is unlikely to take another voyage. Still, that hasn’t stopped Karpelès from dreaming up schemes to get back the missing 650,000 Bitcoins. Even if the original coins can’t be retrieved, perhaps Mt. Gox could be revived long enough to generate revenue to finally make creditors whole; Karpelès also says he’s found one exchange that seems interested in pledging some of its own profits to victims.

But others, such as Kraken’s Powell, say the hole is simply too deep to fill. Besides, even if Mt. Gox did reopen, who would want to trade there? Adds Burges, the Mt. Gox protester, “It’s like having another ship called the Titanic.” For him, closure means letting the rest of the Bitcoins go down with the ship. 

Video from Wired magazine: Blockchain explained

This is a good video from 'Wired' magazine.
Blockchain Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYip_Vuv8J0&feature=youtu.be

Very useful websites...

Here are some very useful websites...

Armory is the most secure and full featured solution available for users and institutions to generate and store Bitcoin private keys.
https://www.bitcoinarmory.com

Cryptowatch is a cryptocurrency charting and trading platform owned by Kraken.
https://cryptowatch.de

Search Bitcoin and Crypto transactions.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer

Learn about crypto currencies and start to understand some of the fundamental concepts behind the blockchain.
https://www.cryptocompare.com

What is...?

What is Bitcoin? What is Blockchain? What is a cryptocurrency? What is a digital asset? To start answering these questions, I'd recommend to fully look at the material on the website https://bitcoin.org/en/

Hardware Wallets

I recommend getting a hardware wallet.
You can store your bitcoin, cryptocurrency and digital assets on them. Essentially, with a hardware wallet you own and are in control of your 'Private Key'. The benefit of them, is they store your 'valuables' in your own private vault, that only you can access. Hardware wallets are a more secure way to store your bitcoin, cryptocurrency and digital assets, rather than keeping them on an 'exchange' which could be hacked and you lose all your 'valuables'.
Try these places:
https://www.ledger.com/
https://trezor.io/

Exchanges - how to buy Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets

Here is a short list of reputable and trustworthy businesses.
From these websites and or exchanges you will be able to purchase Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets. To do this, you will need to sign up and adhere to verification/identification processes for KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering). This can sometimes take a long time, so be prepared for this step.

No particular order:
https://www.coinbase.com
https://www.kraken.com
https://gemini.com
https://www.circle.com
https://www.coinfloor.co.uk

Satoshi Nakamoto's White Paper

Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper is still recommended reading for anyone studying how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The paper that first introduced Bitcoin
Download the PDF: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Free Book - Princeton University

There is a very good free book. This accompanies the Princeton University Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course.

"Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies" provides a comprehensive introduction to the revolutionary yet often misunderstood new technologies of digital currency.

Download the free PDF book at:
https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf

One of the best resources...

One of the best resources I have come across is from Princeton University. There are a set of 12 video lectures on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNcSSleedtfyDuhBvOQzFzQ

Welcome

Welcome to the blog all about Bitcoin, Blockchain, Crypto and Digital Assets. The aim is to provide interesting links and articles to help learning within the industry/arena/space.