Download pdf here: Consensus in distributed systems 1. Introduction In the physical realm, paper fiat currencies are almost impossible to duplicate. As a result, a spent US Dollar bill cannot be concurrently used by the same payor in a different transaction. In digital space, one could also rule out double spending occurrences by setting up a …
Download pdf here: Bitcoin transaction (pre-Segwit) 1. Introduction Part of philosophy’s oddity lies in its unwavering fueling of the desire of each and every one of its practitioners to put an end to it. The path to fulfillment ends in the revelation of a version of the truth that reigns supreme over any version that preceded …
Download pdf here: Bitcoin ECDSA 1. Introduction Simply stated, a bitcoin transaction is a transfer of spending control between different parties over a pre-specified amount of satoshis. A satoshi is the smallest fraction of a bitcoin and is equivalent to BTC In order to successfuly complete said transfer, the sender must demonstrate that she is the …
Download pdf here: Blockchain fork analysis 1. Introduction In this post we analyze two sources of divergence on the blockchain caused respectively by a natural fork and a malicious fork. The revolution that has been brought about by Bitcoin’s blockchain is a direct result of its open nature. Indeed, anyone can be part of it, suggest changes to it, …
Download pdf here: Bitcoin Key and Addresses 1. Introduction and Bitcoin’s elliptic curve review The objective of this post is to introduce the reader to Bitcoin’s private and public keys, and to the Bitcoin addresses used in Pay to Public Key Hash transactions (P2PKH) and Pay to Script Hash transactions (P2SH). As was previously introduced in the Elliptic …
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Download pdf here: Elliptic Curve Groups 1. Introduction and motivation The sempiternel question of how to gain and maintain power has haunted the minds of humanity’s brightest and darkest since the dawn of civilization. Be it physical (e.g., military) or economical (e.g., wealth), power’s very existence relied in part on access to information. Asymmetric information that …
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Download pdf here: Groups and Finite Fields 1. Introduction Group, field and elliptic curve theories make a regular appearance in the study of crypto-assets including but not limited to cryptocurrencies. For example, the security strength of a number of crypto-specific primitives relies on the math of elliptic curve groups over finite fields. These groups constitute a …
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Download pdf here: The Stealth Address System 1. Introduction The previous nine parts introduced Monero’s privacy and confidentiality attributes in so far as senders’ identities and transaction amounts were concerned. This part focuses on privacy with respect to the recipients of funds. To that end, we introduce the stealth address system [8] to ensure that any …
Download pdf here: Digital Signature and Other Prerequisites 1. Introduction We divide this post into 6 sections. Section 2 is a qualitative description of digital signature schemes. Section 3 motivates the introduction of hash functions along with some of their desired properties. Section 4 describes a hypothetical ideal random function known as a Random Oracle. Section …